Read 2026-10-04
hickory-dns/hickory-dns: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in hickory-dns/hickory-dns's code and history at ec87f21: its licence, security advisories, releases, review practice, tests, dependencies and operations. Every finding cites the file and line it rests on. The full report also covers the team and asks the questions the code cannot answer.
| Dimension | Rating |
|---|---|
| Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance | strong |
| Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity | strong |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | strong |
| Security & Reliability Posture | strong |
| Observability & Operations | not assessable |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
- Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongcrates/net/src/dnssec/mod.rs is 3,518 lines, 18× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 193 lines. 5 files exceed 1,930 lines, the largest being 3,518. Size is not a defect on its own — some problems genuinely live in one place — but these are where merge conflicts, review fatigue and single-owner knowledge concentrate, and they are the first thing that slows an inheriting engineer down.
crates/net/src/dnssec/mod.rs:1 — 3,518 lines (18× median) |
crates/resolver/src/name_server.rs:1 — 2,798 lines (14× median) |
crates/proto/src/rr/domain/name.rs:1 — 2,676 lines (13× median) |
crates/resolver/src/name_server_pool.rs:1 — 1,980 lines (10× median) |
crates/proto/src/rr/rdata/svcb.rs:1 — 1,930 lines (10× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
strongNo finding.
Product & Engineering Maturity
strongReleases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
adequateThe newest release, v0.26.3, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is v0.26.0. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.
| tag v0.26.3 |
Security & Reliability Posture
strongThe build runs third-party code it does not pin
adequate7 third-party CI actions are referenced by a tag or branch rather than a commit, so they run whatever that tag points to on the day. Tags have been moved to malicious commits in real supply-chain attacks, and a piped script is whatever the server returns that minute. Pinning to a commit is the fix, and it is small.
.github/workflows/conformance.yml:37 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/conformance.yml:41 — action pinned by tag |
44 advisories against this project in the last 24 months, 14 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-09-18. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. Whether 44 of them are fixed in the code you ship could not be told from this history: its version is only known to be at least 0.26.0. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version.
| 2026-09-18: CVE-2026-93657 (high): hickory-resolver versions before 0.26.2 fail to propagate bogus DNSSEC proof states through the Resolver::lookup() and Resolver::lookup_ip() APIs, allowing inva |
| 2026-09-03: GHSA-67wc-6jq8-ghrc (moderate), fixed in 0.26.2: Remote memory-amplification DoS via attacker-controlled RR counts in DNS message parsing |
| 2026-09-03: GHSA-x962-5xwx-fr8x (low), fixed in 0.26.2: Unchecked subtraction in TSIG RDATA decoding panics when overflow checks are enabled |
| 2026-09-03: GHSA-hx8c-fjhc-hmf5 (high), fixed in 0.26.2: Panic in zone file parser for SVCB and HTTPS |
| 2026-09-03: GHSA-wgfr-mphw-j5g4 (high), fixed in 0.26.2: Panic in zone file parser for SVCB and HTTPS |
Observability & Operations
not assessableNot rated: only 4 of 16 checks could reach a conclusion here; the rest do not apply to this repository or could not read it.
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
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The full report on hickory-dns/hickory-dns: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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