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What Could You Do With a Bogus Root Name Server?
Barlaam notes a post from the Renesys Blog which follows up on news they discussed a couple weeks ago about the 'identity theft' of a root name server. To emphasize the issue of safeguarding such a system, they've now posted an explanation of exactly how the situation could be exploited.
"It shouldn't be too hard to see that you could end up answering every DNS query from an organization that came to you for an updated list of root name servers. Every one. And you might end up doing this for a very long time, especially if your answers were largely correct. An attack like this would have no resemblance to the YouTube hijack, where the entire planet gets a blank page and it's immediately apparent that something isn't right. Obvious events like this will continue to occur, and we'll continue to resolve them relatively quickly. But as this incident demonstrates, DNS hijacks are far less obvious and potentially far more harmful."
.. do what we do every night.. try to take over the world!!
.... You could be cashing in big time..... )
(Seriously, Imagine borrowing every bank's front page in North America
i would redirect http://slashdot.org/ to http:///..org
yeah how funny is it now that the joke is on the other foot biatches!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... whereby you can actually "sign" digital data so that it's clear where it came from. If somehow they could incorporate that into this whole "DNS" system, maybe it would fix the problem?
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
If you have lost DNS, game is over, you lose. A recipe if your system hits a compromised root server.
Better yet, people often use similar IDs and passwords into other systems. Evil hackers can often use the email to figure out which banks, credit, stock brokers and on line e-tailers you use. Maybe change the home address of your Amazon account and order stuff, if the e-tailor isn't right on top of it.
Root servers need to be secure, end of story.
I should note the above method would also work with SSL, be creative, it only has to be a legitimate cert with a root chain.
Seriously, in the last decade the premise that the Net is always there has become a silent assumption underlying a lot of critical systems. No I'm not talking about nuclear power stations being online, I'm talking about basic logistics chain outages that mean there's no-one there to run the power station, because they've no fuel for their car, because the petrol tanker driver is off scavaging food for his kids. There are a number of scenarios that could knock out the net (or at least cause widespread depeering, so you'd be stuck on your provider's network and unable to get traffic to/from anywhere else); it would be... well, a bit too interesting for my liking to see how things would go with, say, a seven day outage. Actually a 7 day outage might be just enough to wake people up to the importance of patching your infrastructure, having a heterogenous mix of code for all critical functions, oh and and enforcing BGP security.
Back in Febrary 2006 I wrote a note "What Could You Do With Your Own Root Server" at
http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000232.html
My conclusions were that one could make money and cause trouble.
One of the more interesting aspects was (and still is) that one could operate root servers and, using the Google model, pay ISPs and users to send their queries to your roots so that you could generate data mining revenues.
That quality of data that is minded form root traffic would not be as good as that as from a top level domain server - and who has some large top level domains and also has root servers? Verisign.
And ICANN's contract with Verisign explicitly permits data mining of query traffic.
Time for you mental midgets to start remembering IP addresses. Do your own damn cacheing.
It's a JOKE! Alright?
What?
You could send all Obama's web traffic to Clinton's web site ... oops, already been done!
216.34.181.48 www.slashdot.org
208.65.153.253 www.youtube.com
208.65.153.238 www.youtube.com
208.65.153.251 www.youtube.com
69.63.184.15 www.facebook.com
81.110.242.129 www.s5h.net
66.102.9.99 www.google.com
66.102.9.104 www.google.com
66.102.9.147 www.google.com
Use google page cache for anything else
Why UNIX?
World-wide Rickroll?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Goatse.cx lives!
Have gnu, will travel.
Ooh, I have an idea. We could request only the parts of the file we actually need. Then we could probably do it in real time; the load on the master server will possible get too heavy, though. I know, our ISPs could cache local copies, and we could split the file into hierarchical chunks.
;)
Hey, I oughta' write up an RFC on this