Nominet, the registry for the .uk top-level domain, has teamed up with Oxford Brookes University to find new ways of investigating abuse of the domain name system (DNS) and registration data stored on its Whois database.

The university will provide the registry with two researchers to lead the development of anti-abuse technology, which will involve detecting patterns in large data sets, according to Nominet's director of IT, Jay Daley.

The project could include the analysis of DNS look-up data to detect new botnets as they went live, or studying Whois look-ups to see whether criminals were trying to harvest the details of domain name registrants to commit fraud.

"We are considerably more sophisticated than anyone else in the internet registry space and this takes it to an even further level," said Daley. "One associate will look at artificial intelligence learning techniques, and the other will look at statistical techniques and [ways to] visualise large sets of data."

The project is set to run for two years.