Algorithms for Extraction and Visualization of Metadata from Domain Name Server Records

Nowadays, security awareness is on every industry agenda. Mitigating threats and assessing risks is key to successful security posture and business continuity. Penetration tests are state-of-the-art and one of the main processes used by security professionals to discover, assess and evaluate a given infrastructure for potential security risks. On this paper we discuss Domain Name Server (DNS) information reconnaissance, a critical phase of any penetration test assessment, and present a tool that implements four different techniques to extract DNS metadata from a given domain namespace: TLD Rotation, Dictionary Attack, Brute Force Permutation and Typos. We present each algorithm and discuss the details of implementation of the tool. Finally, the integration of the tool with a powerful visualization engine to provide seamless graphical representations of the extracted data is discussed. The source code of the tool is available to further research.