Apple Clients Still Vulnerable After DNS Patch

Glenn Fleishman sends word that SANS Institute testing indicates that, even after installing Apple's latest patch for the DNS vulnerability, Leopard desktops (not servers) are still vulnerable — or at least perpetuate risky behavior that makes exploitation easier. This matters because "With servers rapidly being patched worldwide, it's likely that the low-hanging fruit disappears, and vectors [will be] designed to attack massive numbers of clients on ISP networks."

Comments

My own DNS implementaion was never vulnerable

[Ex-Linux-Fanboy]

You know, the ISC should have fixed this issue in 2001. This is an old known issue with DNS and DNS implementors who cared about security were never vulnerable to this particular hole.

I think one of the reasons MaraDNS (my own DNS server) is as good as it is is because I paid attention to DJB's writings. You know, a lot of people don't like DJB and his software is very polarizing. His confrontational behavior towards BIND and Sendmail was, at best, very unprofessional. I also don't like his dishonesty about the security issues both DjbDNS and Qmail have, pretending that these programs have no security problems. That is also fanboy behavior and not behavior a responsible software developer should have. The license was an issue for years, also; when the license was finally made reasonable late 2007 it has been too long to really develop a community of developers around either DjbDNS or Qmail (or Publicfile or...).

That said, he had some good ideas. The idea of randomizing both the query ID and the source port came from DJB and I implemented it in MaraDNS because I took the time to read what he had to say about DNS before implementing MaraDNS.

It is unfortunate that the bad blood between DJB and the BIND developers made it so BIND didn't implement source port randomization back in, say, 2001. It was known and a good idea then; it's essential today.

- Sam