Perils of Transitive Trust in the Domain Name System Venugopalan Ramasubramanian Emin Gün Sirer Cornell University
How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time? Part 2 Venugopalan Ramasubramanian Emin Gün Sirer Cornell University
Introduction DNS is critical to the Internet DNS architecture is based on delegations – control for names is delegated to name servers designated by the name owner delegations facilitate high scalability and decentralized administration – what about security?
sprintlink.net tel .net sprintip.com Dependencies for vericenter.com gov.zoneedit.com zoneedit.com dns[,2].sprintip.com ns[3,4,5,6].vericenter.com fbi.gov gov com gtld-servers.net nstld.com net zoneedit.com root
Subtle Dependencies in DNS 86 servers, 17 domains cs.rochester.edu cs.wisc.edu itd.umich.edu 48 nameservers, 20 domains DNS dependencies are subtle and complex are administrators aware of what they depend on? increases risk of domain hijacks
Servers with Security Loopholes [slate,cayuga].cs.rochester.edu source: internet systems consortium ( dns[,2].sprintip.com ns[3,4,5,6].vericenter.com fbi.gov ns[1,2,3]-auth.sprintlink.net reston-ns[1,3].tel .net reston-ns[2].tel .net sprintip.com
Survey Goals 1. Which domain names have large dependencies and entail high risk? 2. Which domains are affected by servers with known security holes and can be easily taken over? 3. Which servers control the largest portion of the namespace and are thus likely to be attacked?
Survey Methodology domain names (Yahoo and Dmoz.org) name servers domains, 196 top-level-domain
Most Vulnerable Names Number of Dependencies 2226Median Max 6846Mean Top 500All
Most Vulnerable Names
Vulnerability to Security Flaws survey of BIND version numbers 17% of servers have known loopholes [ISC] 45% of names are not totally safe security through obscurity! – more than 40% of servers hide version numbers – 19/46 reports for cs.cornell.edu and 18/86 for fbi.gov
Vulnerability
Vulnerability to Security Flaws
Critical Assets
Most Valuable Nameservers arizona.edu ucla.edu uoregon.edu nyu.edu berkeley.edu Top 5 Domains
Conclusions Domain names have subtle dependencies – name-based delegations High risk of domain hijacks – well-known software loopholes – leading to more effective phishing attacks
DNS-SEC Security Standard for DNS based on public-key cryptography and digitally signed certificates Not widely used currently – security at delegation points – authenticated denials – islands of security Does not eliminate name-based delegations
DNS Bottlenecks
Safe Bottlenecks
Safety
Dependencies
Critical Assets 2
Dependencies for fbi.edgesuite.net a33.g.akamai.net ns[1-6].vericenter.com vericenter.com gov gov.zoneedit.com zoneedit.com zoneedit.com com gtld-servers.net nstld.com net edgesuite.net akam.net g.akamai.net akamai.net akamaitech.net dns[,2].sprintip.com ns[3,4,5,6].vericenter.com fbi.gov ns[1,2,3]-auth.sprintlink.net reston-ns[1,2,3].tel .net sprintip.com