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DNS Flaw Hits More Than Just the Web

Posted by timothy on from the gee-dan-thanks-thanks-a-bunch dept.

gringer writes "Dan Kaminsky presented at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, and said that the DNS vulnerability he discovered is much more dangerous than most have appreciated. Besides hijacking web browsers, hackers might attack email services and spam filters, FTP, Rsync, BitTorrent, Telnet, SSH, as well as SSL services. Ultimately it's not a question of which systems can be attacked by exploiting the flaw, but rather which ones cannot. Then again, it could just be hype. For more information, see Kaminsky's power point presentation." Update: 08/07 19:48 GMT by T : There's also an animation of the progress of the patch.

3 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. SSH and SSL protected by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    SSH will raise the key changed warning if you've connected before.

    SSL will raise a certificate error unless they have some way of getting a fake cert.

    1. Re:SSH and SSL protected by brunascle · · Score: 5, Informative

      which is why browsers come with the CAs' public keys cached.

  2. Bittorrent? Not really. by 42forty-two42 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Virtually all bittorrent clients support a distributed hash table, and inter-client peer exchange protocol, which means that as long as you have the .torrent metafile you can bootstrap yourself into the torrent (neither DHT nor peer exchange uses DNS at all in fact, except perhaps when the client is first installed to bootstrap). The only impact would be on obtaining said .torrent file, which is explicitly out of bittorrent's problem domain.