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Is Protective DNS Blocking the Wild West?

Published: October 29, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.25352v1

By: David Plonka, Branden Palacio, Debbie Perouli

Potential Business Impact:

Blocks bad websites to keep people safe online.

Business Areas:
Penetration Testing Information Technology, Privacy and Security

We perform a passive measurement study investigating how a Protective DNS service might perform in a Research & Education Network serving hundreds of member institutions. Utilizing freely-available DNS blocklists consisting of domain names deemed to be threats, we test hundreds of millions of users' real DNS queries, observed over a week's time, to find which answers would be blocked because they involve domain names that are potential threats. We find the blocklists disorderly regarding their names, goals, transparency, and provenance making them quite difficult to compare. Consequently, these Protective DNS underpinnings lack organized oversight, presenting challenges and risks in operation at scale.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
3 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Cryptography and Security