Methods / 07
Count precisely. Claim narrowly.
WireBudget is a local structural reader and byte-budget comparison tool.
Reviewed October 15, 2026
Two evidence modes
Wire mode consumes exactly one DNS message. It parses header counts, questions and record envelopes, follows bounded backward name pointers, and partitions every byte into a component. RRSIG and DNSKEY receive additional field accounting. OPT options are checked for declared-length bounds; their payloads are not decoded.
dig mode reads supported text markers from one response. Message size is client-reported, not independently counted. The tool does not manufacture a byte-layout diagram from names printed in text because wire compression is no longer visible there.
Limits and deliberate omissions
- DNS payload: 12–65,535 bytes; optional TCP prefix: two additional bytes.
- Text/file import: 300,000 characters/bytes respectively. Raw binary imports remain limited to one DNS payload plus optional prefix.
- At most 256 questions, 1024 resource records and 128 name-pointer/label steps per name.
- At most 50 record rows displayed at a time; the exported report retains all parsed record metadata.
- No signature calculation, DNSKEY-to-DS verification, signature-time validation, trust-anchor lookup or complete RDATA schema validation.
- No active query, packet capture, UDP/TCP reachability test or path-MTU measurement.
A matching known signature length earns no security verdict. Unsupported label encodings, incomplete declared fields, invalid pointer directions, duplicate/misplaced OPT records and trailing bytes stop the import. Other record payloads remain opaque. The tool is not a general-purpose DNS protocol conformance suite.
How the release is checked
Tests compare hand-accounted synthetic layouts with dated public captures, including the 54-byte truncated and 2563-byte complete examples. Counterexamples exercise short RDATA, loops/invalid pointers, malformed EDNS options, missing transcript fields, framing mismatches and wrong signature lengths. UI checks cover file input, clearing, report download, mobile layout and local-only processing.
Primary references
- RFC 1035 — message fields and name compression.
- RFC 4034 — DNSKEY and RRSIG layouts.
- RFC 6891 — EDNS metadata and option framing.
- RFC 7766 and RFC 9715 — transport and fragmentation guidance.
- IANA registry and ML-DSA draft 03 — algorithm identifiers and mapping, reviewed October 15, 2026.
Sources can change. A dated reference or sample is not a claim that all resolvers now support algorithm 18. Corrections can be sent to support@cleantempmail.com; describe the field and expected behavior without sending private captures.