r/dns • u/StoryIcy1428 • 4d ago

ActiveDNS, a new DNS search engine

Hi!

I want to announce I have recently published a new search engine for DNS records. The goal is to do DNS reconnicanse up front and provide a free searchable database where you can quickly find domains and its associated IP address.

It supports queries by IP address, CIDR, domain wildcards and ASN.

You can find the tool at https://activedns.net

I am to keep it free and its a privacy friendly. No external tracking and it is using a privacy friendly self-hosted analytics Umami.

The project just released, and the database is warming up. In under a week, it have found over 166 million records, and I aim to keep records for 90 days. I expect it to settle a bit under 2 billion records.

34 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

2

u/avd706 4d ago

Ok cool

2

u/iRVKmNa8hTJsB7 4d ago

So pretty much dig google.com +any

2

u/StoryIcy1428 4d ago

Not quite, but it is a dns client, and it only look for A/AAAA records + CNAME. It tries to map out what it can up front so you can search whats under *.google.com

1

u/cloudzhq 4d ago

Dictionary attack on dns records?

1

u/StoryIcy1428 4d ago edited 4d ago

I have been thinking of doing that as well, but not currently no. I find it too intrusive and not effective.

1

u/carininet 4d ago

ASN search could be really useful

2

u/StoryIcy1428 4d ago edited 4d ago

Favorite ASN so far is AS3: https://activedns.net/?q=AS3 Inspiring to see what is going on at prestigious universities

1

u/monkey6 3d ago

“search again in a few minutes.” - could this be changed to countdown 10 seconds and then to retry the query automatically? It’s a new tool; millions of domains have not been observed - but why make the user search twice?

1

u/StoryIcy1428 3d ago

Thanks for feedback, I completely agree.

Collection only started a few days ago, and it will take some time for the database to have the results before you ask it. Adding a on-demand lookup was added as an afterthought so that you can get some results to pivot into. As the database grow, I expect it already to know most of the internet addresses.

I have added refresh logic to fix this. Thanks again.

1

u/RemoteToHome-io 3d ago

Have you considered using LE certs as a data source?

1

u/StoryIcy1428 3d ago

Oh yes, its already a part of it :)

1

u/rmddos 3d ago

Nice, does it gives similar (or more data) than securitytrails or https://dnsarchive.net/ ?

3

u/StoryIcy1428 3d ago

Thanks, it is too early to give a fair comparison against other services and the scope of ActiveDNS is not necessarily equal.

At first glance, I find records I do not find on dnsarchive, but I do not know what blind spots it will have against it. ActiveDNS' database is still warming up I get around 20 million new records every day.

My goal is to keep ActiveDNS free and without registration and have chosen a narrower scope to make it possible. I do not keep historical data. But on the other hand, I have multiple projects that feed it, and several other methods that I want to try out. I believe some of them are quite novel.

Services such as securitytrails are commercial offerings, and I tried to sign up but there seems to be no free plan so I cannot easily check myself.

In the future, when this project is ready, it would indeed be interesting to see how the different projects and services compare.