TLDR 2 - A Continuously Updated Historical TLD Records Archive

This repository is updated hourly with the results from DNS zone transfer attempts against the root nameservers and all existing TLD servers. This is done to keep record of zone files for various TLDs and to monitor how these zones change overtime.

Click here to view the list of commits and see how the various TLD & root zones change overtime.

Click here to view the list of nameservers with zone transfers enabled.

Zone Transfers for Roots and TLDs

Allowing global zone transfers is sometimes considered a security vulnerability due to this functionality giving attackers the ability to easily enumerate all DNS zone data for a specific domain. This is often seen as an issue for system administrators who want to make enumeration of sub-domains and other DNS data hard for malicious actors.

However, when it comes to TLDs and the root nameservers, zone transfers are shown in a different light. Zone transfers at this level can be beneficial as they are an easy way for a TLD to be transparent about its DNS changes. This project is not meant to encourage TLD DNS hosting providers to disable global zone transfers but rather to gather data on the ever-changing zone information for the Internet's TLDs.

Fork Info

This is a fork of the original (discontinued) TLDR project by Matthew Bryant, which can be found here: https://github.com/mandatoryprogrammer/TLDR

Differences between TLDR-2 and TLDR:

• TLDR-2 will request up to 25 simultaneous AXFRs, TLDR will only request 1. This significantly boosts the speed of a full scan.
• TLDR-2 only saves successful AXFRs. This should help keep the repo a manageable size and make the results easier to navigate.
• TLDR-2 is actively updated, using a GitHub Action to keep up to date.
• In addition to transferable_zones.md, TLDR-2 generates a tab-separated list of AXFR-able zones in transferable_zones.tsv.

Credit

This project was inspired by Peter Bowen's work which can be found here: https://github.com/pzb/TLDs

See Also

• zone-walks - a collection of domains collected from DNSSEC zone-walking TLDs. Auto-updated.