- TXT records were intended as a catch all for stuff that didn't have a resource record officially defined. Their use in email authentication came (much) later and, arguably, for bad reasons (there was a record defined for one form of email authentication, SPF, but folks in the IETF thought it was too hard to have client libraries and DNS server user interfaces updated to support it, so they decided to use TXT instead).
- You can fit more than around 65,280 bytes in TXT records, not "about 2,000 characters of text" (Maybe the 2000 limit is a limitation of Cloudflare?)
- If you control the authoritative server, you could, in theory, chain an unbounded number of names within a zone, e.g., 000001.example.com, 000002.example.com, etc., to store an unlimited amount of data.
I was hoping someone had just shown that DNS was Turing complete (extending https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~todd/research/hotnets21.pdf). Using the DNS as a remote file store isn't as interesting.
Some quibbles:
- TXT records were intended as a catch all for stuff that didn't have a resource record officially defined. Their use in email authentication came (much) later and, arguably, for bad reasons (there was a record defined for one form of email authentication, SPF, but folks in the IETF thought it was too hard to have client libraries and DNS server user interfaces updated to support it, so they decided to use TXT instead).
- You can fit more than around 65,280 bytes in TXT records, not "about 2,000 characters of text" (Maybe the 2000 limit is a limitation of Cloudflare?)
- If you control the authoritative server, you could, in theory, chain an unbounded number of names within a zone, e.g., 000001.example.com, 000002.example.com, etc., to store an unlimited amount of data.
- Or, you can use open resolvers as a file store (https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dns-filesystem-true-cloud-st...)
Pretty funny. You can store files just about anywhere these days. I saw one repo where you can store doom as PIV certificates on a yubikey
How fast are txt records to fetch? Does it do them all at once or sequentially?