I was listening to this week’s edition of Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast and Steve talked about a unique way of using DNS. His spintrite application uses DNS to check for the latest version of the application. Most applications use http to check version information. This might pose a problem in environments with proxy servers. DNS traffic on the other hand is generally allowed in most environments. He says his application does a DNS lookup for something like application.version.grc.com and the “IP” address that is returned denotes the major and minor versions of the code. And depending on the response, the application will prompt with a “need to update” message.
Brilliant!!!
Here’s a more technical post way back from 2006 by Jan-Piet Mens on the same subject
http://jpmens.net/pages/checking-current-application-or-data-versions-using-dns/
