DNS Cache Poisoning, the Internet Attack From 2008, is Back From the Dead
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
DNS cache poisoning, the Internet attack from 2008, is back from the dead:
In 2008, researcher Dan Kaminsky revealed one of the more severe Internet security threats ever: a weakness in the domain name system that made it possible for attackers to send users en masse to imposter sites instead of the real ones belonging to Google, Bank of America, or anyone else. With industrywide coordination, thousands of DNS providers around the world installed a fix that averted this doomsday scenario.
Now, Kaminsky's DNS cache poisoning attack is back. Researchers on Wednesday presented a new technique that can once again cause DNS resolvers to return maliciously spoofed IP addresses instead of the site that rightfully corresponds to a domain name.
"This is a pretty big advancement that is similar to Kaminsky's attack for some resolvers, depending on how [they're] actually run," said Nick Sullivan, head of research at Cloudflare, a content-delivery network that operates the 1.1.1.1 DNS service. "This is amongst the most effective DNS cache poisoning attacks we've seen since Kaminsky's attack. It's something that, if you do run a DNS resolver, you should take seriously."
[...] On Wednesday, researchers from Tsinghua University and the University of California, Riverside presented a technique that, once again, makes cache poisoning feasible. Their method exploits a side channel that identifies the port number used in a lookup request. Once the attackers know the number, they once again stand a high chance of successfully guessing the transaction ID.
The side channel in this case is the rate limit for ICMP, the abbreviation for the Internet Control Message Protocol. To conserve bandwidth and computing resources, servers will respond to only a set number of requests from other servers. After that, servers will provide no response at all. Until recently, Linux always set this limit to 1,000 per second.
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