Re: CAIS-ALERT: Vulnerability in the sending requests control of BIND

From: D. J. Bernstein (djbat_private)
Date: Wed Nov 27 2002 - 14:20:05 PST

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    Vagner Sacramento writes:
    > BIND versions 4 and 8 use procedures that allow a remote DNS Spoofing
    > attack against DNS servers.
    
    Nonsense. All DNS caches will accept forged packets. See
    
       http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/forgery.html
    
    for an analysis of the cost of a forgery.
    
    Yes, the cost of a blind forgery depends quite noticeably on the
    software---it's larger for dnscache (djbdns) than for BIND 9 thanks to
    BIND's port reuse, and larger for BIND 9 than for older versions of BIND
    thanks to this ``vulnerability,'' which has been known for years---but
    thinking that software can protect you from forged DNS packets with the
    current DNS protocol is like thinking that shorts and a T-shirt will
    protect you from the winter wind in Chicago.
    
    Furthermore, the recommendation to limit recursion, while certainly a
    good idea, doesn't make a big difference in the cost unless you also
    clamp down on all the programs that act as DNS-query-tunneling tools:
    SMTP servers, web browsers, etc.
    
    ---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
    Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
    



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