If you need a battle-ready DNS system, take a look at the latest offering from start-up Secure64 Software.

Secure64 in March announced the general availability of a super-fast and secure DNS server software that it says has built-in protection against denial-of-service attacks, rootkits and malware.

Secure64 officials say their DNS server software provides the fastest performance in the world, with more than 100,000 queries per second.

Secure64 is targeting its DNS server at service providers and enterprises that operate carrier-class networks.

The Secure64 DNS server gets its security advantages from two aspects of its design:

* It uses a special-purpose micro-operating system called SourceT that was built from the ground up for security. Because SourceT is new and less popular than Windows, Linux or Unix, it has fewer known security holes for hackers to exploit.

* It runs exclusively on HP servers that use Intel’s Itanium 2 processors. These servers provide very high performance, which helps withstand denial-of-service and other network flooding attacks because they can handle so many queries per second.

"SourceT is a secure architecture that is immune from malware including Trojans, viruses and worms because we’ve designed them out of the architecture," says Mark Beckett, vice president of marketing for Secure64. "It’s our high-performance I/O stack that self-protects the system against denial-of-service attacks."

Secure64 says its SourceT micro operating system is built to be secure so it doesn’t need to be hardened like competitive products running on Windows or Linux. It allows minimal configuration to limit possible attacks. It has an authenticated boot process to eliminate rootkits, and it has a secured runtime environment to prohibit malware. It also doesn’t need to be patched.

In terms of performance, Secure64 says it outperforms the most common DNS server software, which is Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND), by three times.

"It responds to legitimate traffic while under attack," Beckett says. "We’ve seen no degradation while our system is under attack. Other DNS servers are unavailable when hit by a denial-of-service attack."

Secure64 officials say their DNS software complies with pertinent IETF standards and interoperates with BIND and Microsoft’s DNS software.