DNS Deep Dive
Trace a DNS resolution from your resolver all the way to an authoritative server with dig +trace, understand what DNSSEC actually protects against, and test encrypted DNS (DoH/DoT) directly against a real resolver.
Prerequisites: TCP/IP Fundamentals.
Before your browser can even open the TCP connection from the previous project, it needs an IP address — and getting one is a small distributed lookup across a hierarchy of servers, not a single request to one authority. DNS is often taught as a black box ("it turns names into IPs") when it's actually one of the more approachable distributed systems you'll encounter, precisely because you can watch every step of it happen with one command.
This project walks that resolution chain end to end, then covers the two things that have changed most about DNS operationally in the past several years: DNSSEC (authenticating that a DNS answer wasn't tampered with) and encrypted DNS transports like DoH and DoT (hiding that you asked the question at all from anyone snooping the network).
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