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Paul Vixie Responds To DNS Hole Skeptics
syncro writes "The recent massive, multi-vendor DNS patch advisory related to DNS cache poisoning vulnerability, discovered by Dan Kaminsky, has made headline news. However, the secretive preparation prior to the July 8th announcement and hype around a promised full disclosure of the flaw by Dan on August 7 at the Black Hat conference has generated a fair amount of backlash and skepticism among hackers and the security research community. In a post on CircleID, Paul Vixie offers his usual straightforward response to these allegations. The conclusion: 'Please do the following. First, take the advisory seriously — we're not just a bunch of n00b alarmists, if we tell you your DNS house is on fire, and we hand you a fire hose, take it. Second, take Secure DNS seriously, even though there are intractable problems in its business and governance model — deploy it locally and push on your vendors for the tools and services you need. Third, stop complaining, we've all got a lot of work to do by August 7 and it's a little silly to spend any time arguing when we need to be patching.'"
That's really hard on web servers that host multiple domains on a single IP. Virtual hosting isn't exactly a new idea.
This issue may be huge. But without all the necessary information, you can't make an informed decision as to whether or not you believe it is.
That same information that allows you to make an "informed decision", as you so blithely put it, puts the integrity of the entire infrastructure and, more to the point, the information security of a whole lof of people at tremendous risk. Dammit, that's the whole point of the OP's observation and why people argue about disclosure in the first place.