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Doom entirely from DNS records

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Why This Matters

This innovative use of DNS TXT records to host and stream the entire DOOM game demonstrates how existing internet infrastructure can be repurposed for unconventional applications. It highlights potential vulnerabilities and creative possibilities in DNS, emphasizing the importance of securing DNS records against misuse while inspiring new ways to leverage DNS for data distribution.

Key Takeaways

DOOM Over DNS

At some point, a reasonable person asked "DNS resolves names to IP addresses, what else can it do?" The answer, apparently, is run DOOM.

DNS TXT records can hold arbitrary text. Cloudflare will serve them globally, for free, cached at the edge, to anyone who asks. They are not a file storage system. They were not designed to be a file storage system. Nobody at the IETF was thinking about them being used as a file storage system when they wrote RFC 1035. And yet here we are.

This project compresses the entirety of shareware DOOM, splits it into ~1,964 DNS TXT records across a single Cloudflare zone, and plays it back at runtime using nothing but a PowerShell script and public DNS queries. The WAD file never touches disk and the .NET game engine DLLs are loaded directly into memory.

It was always DNS.

Quick Start

Play

# 1. Install PowerShell 7 (if you don't have it) winget install Microsoft.PowerShell # 2. Play DOOM . \Start-DoomOverDNS.ps1 - PrimaryZone ' example.com '

That's it. Everything else is fetched from DNS automatically using Resolve-DNSName .

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