On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 9:35 AM, Joe Greco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Well, Paul, I'm not *too* impressed, and so far, I'm not seeing what is
> groundbreaking, except that threats discussed long ago have become more
> practical due to the growth of network and processing speeds, which was
> a hazard that ...  was actually ALSO predicted.

Joe,

Early attacks were based on returning out-of-scope data in the
Additional section of the response. This was an implementation error
in the servers: they should never have accepted out of scope data.

Later attacks were based on forging responses to a query. The resolver
sends a query packet and the attacker has a few tens of milliseconds
in which to throw maybe a few tens of guesses about correct ID at the
resolver before the real answer arrives from the the real server.
These were mitigated because:

a. You had maybe a 1 in 1000 chance of guessing right during the
window of opportunity.
b. If you guessed wrong, you had to wait until the TTL expired to try
again, maybe as much as 24 hours later.

So, it could take months or years to poison a resolver just once, far
below the patience threshold for your run-of-the-mill script kiddie.


What's new about this attack is that it removes mitigator B. You can
guess again and again, back to back, until you hit that 1 in 1000.

Paul tells us this can happen in about 11 seconds, well inside the
tolerance of your normal script kiddie and long before you'll notice
the log messages about invalid responses.


Anyway, it shouldn't be hard to convert this from a poisoning
vulnerability to a less troubling DOS vulnerability by rejecting
responses for a particular query (even if valid) when received near a
bad-id response. From there it just takes some iterative improvements
to mitigate the DOS.

In the mean time, randomizing the query port makes the attack more
than four orders of magnitude less effective and causes it to require
more than four orders of magnitude of additional resources on the
attacker's part.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004

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