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Life & fun · July 31, 2023

File distribution over DNS: (ab)using DNS as a CDN

File distribution over DNS: (ab)using DNS as a CDN launched on July 31, 2023 with 72 votes, #1,290 of 4,347 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.

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In plain words

File Distribution over DNS is a technical project that leverages DNS infrastructure to distribute files, repurposing the Domain Name System as a content delivery network. Created for developers and technical enthusiasts interested in unconventional networking approaches, the project demonstrates how DNS—traditionally used for translating domain names to IP addresses—can be adapted for file transfer purposes. The concept highlights creative uses of existing internet infrastructure.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

This is the story of a one-afternoon hack that turned into a one-weekend hack. I woke up on Saturday with a silly idea: what would it be like to use content-defined chunking (CDC) and serve the chunks over DNS? DNS caching could make scaleout and incremental updates quite efficient, at least in theory. Strong hashing gives robust download integrity. DNS replication gives you a kind of high availability, even! TL;DR. It works, more or less, so long as your resolver properly upgrades to DNS-over-TCP when it gets a truncated UDP response. The immutable, strongly-named chunks are served in TXT records (!) and are cached by resolvers for a long time. This lowers load on the authoritative DNS…from eighty-twenty.org

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