Can It Resolve Doom? Game Engine in 2k DNS Records
a day ago
- #TXT Record Abuse
- #DNS Exploitation
- #DOOM Over DNS
- Author uses DNS TXT records to hide payloads, noting they're easy to set up and hard to detect forensically.
- TXT records can store arbitrary text, allowing storage of files, programs, and even running DOOM via DNS.
- DNS TXT records hold about 2,000 characters each, enabling a free, global, serverless key-value store for data.
- Proof of concept involved storing a duck image in TXT records by splitting Base64-encoded data into chunks.
- For DOOM, author used managed-doom (a C# port) and patched it to run from memory with no disk writes.
- DOOM assets were compressed, requiring about 1,966 TXT records on a single CloudFlare Pro DNS zone.
- A PowerShell script resolves DNS queries, reassembles data in memory, and launches DOOM without writing to disk.
- DNS, though old and designed for hostname mapping, is abusable for file storage and unconventional uses.
- Full project source is available on GitHub, showcasing the absurdity of running DOOM over DNS.