BIND Software Berkeley Internet Name Domain. The application that runs almost every DNS server on the Internet is called BIND, for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, first developed as a graduate student project at the University of California at Berkeley.

Berkeley Internet Name Domain is the most common implementation of the DNS protocol on the Internet. It’s freely available under the BSD License. BIND DNS servers are believed to be providing about 80 percent of all DNS services. BIND was developed by the University of California at Berkeley. The most current release is BIND 9.4.2, and from Version 9 onwards it supports DNS SEC, TSIG, IPv6 and other DNS protocol enhancements.

BIND is open source software that implements the Domain Name System (DNS) protocols for the Internet. It is a reference implementation of those protocols, but it is also production-grade software, suitable for use in high-volume and high-reliability applications.  The name BIND stands for “Berkeley Internet Name Domain”, because the software originated in the early 1980s at the University of California at Berkeley. BIND is by far the most widely used DNS software on the Internet, providing a robust and stable platform on top of which organizations can build distributed computing systems with the knowledge that those systems are fully compliant with published DNS standards.

BIND is the most widely used Domain Name System (DNS) software on the Internet. On Unix-like operating systems it is the de facto standard.

The software was originally designed at the University of California Berkeley (UCB) in the early 1980s. The name originates as an acronym of Berkeley Internet Name Domain, reflecting the application’s use within UCB. The software consists, most prominently, of the DNS server component, called named, a contracted form of name daemon. In addition the suite contains various administration tools, and a DNS resolver interface library. The latest version of BIND is BIND 9, first released in 2000.

Starting in 2009, the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) developed a new software suite, initially called BIND10. With release version 1.2.0 the project was renamed Bundy to terminate ISC involvement in the project.

History

Originally written by four graduate students at the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), BIND was first released with Berkeley Software Distribution 4.3BSD. Paul Vixie started maintaining it in 1988 while working for Digital Equipment Corporation. As of 2012, the Internet Systems Consortium maintains, updates, and writes new versions of BIND.

BIND was written by Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou in the early 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley as a result of a DARPA grant. The acronym BIND is for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, from a technical paper published in 1984.

Versions of BIND through 4.8.3 were maintained by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at UC Berkeley.

In the mid-1980s, Paul Vixie of DEC took over BIND development, releasing versions 4.9 and 4.9.1. Paul Vixie continued to work on BIND after leaving DEC. BIND Version 4.9.2 was sponsored by Vixie Enterprises. Vixie eventually founded the ISC, which became the entity responsible for BIND versions starting with 4.9.3.

BIND 8 was released by ISC in May 1997.

Version 9 was developed by Nominum, Inc. under an ISC outsourcing contract, and the first version was released October 9, 2000. It was written from scratch in part to address the architectural difficulties with auditing the earlier BIND code bases, and also to support DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions). Other important features of BIND 9 include: TSIG, nsupdate, IPv6, rndc (remote name daemon control), views, multiprocessor support, and an improved portability architecture. rndc uses a shared secret to provide encryption for local and remote terminals during each session. The development of BIND 9 took place under a combination of commercial and military contracts. Most of the features of BIND 9 were funded by UNIX vendors who wanted to ensure that BIND stayed competitive with Microsoft’s DNS offerings; the DNSSEC features were funded by the US military, which regarded DNS security as important. BIND 9 was released in September 2000.

In 2009, ISC started an effort to develop a new version of the software suite, called BIND10. In addition to DNS service, the BIND10 suite also included IPv4 and IPv6 DHCP server components. In April 2014, with the BIND10 release 1.2.0 the ISC concluded its development work of the project and renamed the project Bundy, moving the source code repository to GitHub for further development by outside public efforts. Bundy is community-supported at the web site http://bundy-dns.de/. ISC discontinued its involvement in the project due to cost-cutting measures. The development of DHCP components was split off to become a new Kea project.

Database support

While earlier versions of BIND offered no mechanism to store and retrieve zone data in anything other than flat text files, in 2007 BIND 9.4[6] DLZ provided a compile-time option for zone storage in a variety of database formats including LDAP, Berkeley DB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and ODBC.

BIND 10 planned to make the data store modular, so that a variety of databases may be connected.

Security

Security issues that are discovered in BIND 9 are patched and publicly disclosed in keeping with common principles of open source software. A complete list of security defects that have been discovered and disclosed in BIND9 is maintained by Internet Systems Consortium, the current authors of the software.

The BIND 4 and BIND 8 releases both had serious security vulnerabilities. Use of these ancient versions, or any un-maintained, non-supported version is strongly discouraged. BIND 9 was a complete rewrite, in part to mitigate these ongoing security issues. The downloads page on the ISC web site clearly shows which versions are currently maintained and which are end of life.