Security In Plain Txt Observing The Use Of Dns Txt Records In The Wild

The Domain Name System is a critical piece of infrastructure that has expanded into use cases beyond its original intent. DNS TXT records are intentionally very permissive in what information can be stored there, and as a result are often used in broad and undocumented ways to support Internet security and networked applications. In this paper, we identified and categorized the patterns in TXT record use from a representative collection of resource record sets. We obtained the records from a data set containing 1.4 billion TXT records collected over a 2 year period and used pattern matching to identify record use cases present across multiple domains. We found that 92% of these records generally fall into 3 categories; protocol enhancement, domain verification, and resource location. While some of these records are required to remain public, we discovered many examples that unnecessarily reveal domain information or present other security threats (e.g., amplification attacks) in conflict with best practices in security.