Join the DNS Hackathon 2025

Netnod, DNS-OARC and the RIPE NCC invite you to join us for our second joint DNS Hackathon in Stockholm. The event takes place from 15 - 16 March 2025, the weekend before NETNOD meeting.

Hackathons provide a great opportunity to meet others in your field and outside it, and to exchange knowledge and experience with people other than your everyday colleagues.

We aim to develop new tools, ideas, experiments, measurements and possible solutions all revolving around the DNS - because it's always DNS isn't it! :D

We will do this by bringing people together from different communities, sharing all the work openly and, most importantly, by having fun!

Apply now for the DNS Hackathon 2025

Important dates and deadlines

15 October 2024 - Applications open
1st December 2024 - First application deadline
17th December 2024 - First round acceptance letters sent

2nd February 2025 - Second application deadline
6th February 2025 - Second round acceptance letters sent

Early March 2025 - Introductory webinar for hackathon participants
15-16 March 2025 - DNS Hackathon in Stockholm

Selection process

We are looking for participants who are passionate about the DNS from the lowest protocol level up to the highest application usage, and who are interested in everything around developing, measuring and securing DNS-related tools and applications.

That means we are looking for people from a variety of backgrounds, including those who might not work directly with DNS and still want to contribute. We also need network engineers, users, designers, students, documentation writing volunteers, and enthusiastic beginners!

The event has a limited number of seats, therefore we have to find a way to choose participants. Instead of going for "first come, first accepted", we want to be able to create the most diverse group consisting of:

Beginners and experts
Developers and designers
Hackers and engineers
Skilled at C, Python, Perl, Rust, Go etc. ;-)
A diverse range of nationalities, cultures and genders

The Programme Committee and Organisation Team will use your application information to make a choice based on:

Your motivation
Experience and skills
A limit of two people from the same organisation

Venue and travel

The hackathon will take place in Stockholm.

The organisers will not be making any travel or accommodation arrangements for the participants. Please be aware that Stockholm is a popular tourist destination, so accommodation might be difficult to find if you do not plan this in advance.

Public transport is very efficient, though, so staying further away from the city centre can be a good option.

If you need to apply for a visa, NETNOD may be able to offer assistance in the form of an invitation letter

The hackathon is free of charge - there is no fee to pay, and food and drinks will be provided throughout the event on both days. On Saturday we will have a social event with dinner for all participants. More information will be provided closer to the hackathon date.

Hackathon challenges - are you ready?

Participants will work in small teams during the hackathon. In order to help you come up with or select a challenge/project/task to work on, we're suggesting the following themes:

Sustainability
Privacy vs Performance
IoT

You can also suggest your own project when applying or specify that you wish to work on one of the project ideas below. And please specify if you need any specific resources, such as cloud computing, data repositories etc. Access to RIPE Atlas will be provided.

Sustainability

The sustainability theme focuses on the long-term ecological, economic and social impact of Internet infrastructure. This could be a follow-up from the previous "Green DNS" topic (2023), or continuation of the "Green Tech" hackathon projects (2024) -- or something completely new!

Privacy vs performance

DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT) were introduced to enhance the security of the traditionally unencrypted DNS protocol. With growing concerns over user privacy and data security, encrypted DNS traffic is becoming increasingly important. DoH and DoT prevent third parties from snooping on DNS queries or altering responses. However, while these protocols offer enhanced privacy, there are concerns about their impact on performance and the centralisation of DNS resolution, with companies like Google and Cloudflare becoming more dominant in this space.

Another consideration is how these protocols affect threat hunting. Since DoH and DoT encrypt DNS traffic, traditional methods of DNS monitoring for malicious activity (such as DNS-based threat detection) are disrupted, potentially making it more difficult to detect certain threats.

Project ideas:

Evaluate the performance impact of DoH and DoT and to analyse their adoption rates across different sectors.
Impact of DoH and DoT over threat hunting and how it can be improved.

Increase in IoT devices and impact on DNS infrastructure

IoT devices heavily rely on DNS for communication and functionality. With the explosion of IoT devices, there’s growing concern about the security and scalability of DNS infrastructure. IoT devices are often vulnerable to being hijacked and used in DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

Project ideas:

Any studies or research examining the robustness of DNS infrastructure considering the increasing number of IoT devices
Using RIPE Atlas probes as IoT devices?

Bring your own idea!

Are you interested in other topics related to the DNS? Feel free to bring your ideas, concepts, or prototypes to the event as well!

Project ideas:

Incremental (or complete... hey why not?) work towards resolverless DNS.
Compare returning GeoIP-based NS vs. anycast solutions, possibly with modelling/simulation.
Reproducing (or not) of already published DNS research.

Hackathon format

This hackathon is:

Non-commercial; we (DNS-OARC, Netnod, RIPE NCC) are hosting this hackathon as a not-for-profit event and give no monetary prizes
All resulting software, tools and documentation will be released under non-commercial licenses
Non-competitive; we prefer cooperation and teamwork

To learn more about similar kind of hackathons, read about our previous hackathons on IoT and DNS!

Before the event

Applicants can use the collaborative tools to help plan shared work. We will also organise a webinar to explain the process, introduce the available tools and proposed projects for participants a week or two before the event.

If you need help planning the shared work, or if you are struggling with ideas, don’t hesitate to contact the Programme Committee via: dnshackathon2023 [at] dns-oarc [dot] net.

During the event

The venue will be open for work/play times for the event, between 9am and 6pm. On Saturday we will go out for a social dinner.

In addition to already proposed challenges, participants are encouraged to propose projects they wish to work on, either completely new ideas, or existing projects.

Participants will work in small teams, with each team focusing on a chosen project, idea or challenge. Teams can form in advance, using the provided collaboration tools, or at the beginning of the hackathon. All source code developed during the hackathon will be publicly licensed and available on GitHub, and accessible for the entire community to use. A variety of goodies will be provided for participating.

Since we want to focus on collaboration and not on competition, there will be no single prize winner. We will showcase all achievements during the closing session. Several projects will be awarded symbolic prizes in a few different creative categories.

After the Hackathon

Since this event is very short and for the sake of continuity, all projects will be documented on GitHub, and the teams will be encouraged to stay in touch with each other.

An overview of the hackathon results will also be presented at the DNS working group during future RIPE meetings and it's possible that the working group chairs will invite one or more teams to give a more extensive presentation about their work.

We will have an online recap meeting within a month of the hackathon, and we will be planning follow-up events where we can meet again and continue our work together.