5 Years After Major DNS Flaw Found, Few US Companies Have Deployed Long-term Fix

alphadogg writes "Five years after the disclosure of a serious vulnerability in the Domain Name System dubbed the Kaminsky bug, only a handful of U.S. ISPs, financial institutions or e-commerce companies have deployed DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) to alleviate this threat. In 2008, security researcher Dan Kaminsky described a major DNS flaw that made it possible for hackers to launch cache poisoning attacks, where traffic is redirected from a legitimate website to a fake one without the website operator or end user knowing. While DNS software patches are available to help plug the Kaminsky hole, experts agree that the best long-term fix is DNSSEC, which uses digital signatures and public-key encryption to allow websites to verify their domain names and corresponding IP addresses and prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. Despite the promise of DNSSEC, the number of U.S. corporations that have deployed this added layer of security to their DNS server is minuscule."

Comments

DNSSEC is not the best long term fix

[Anonymous Coward]

DNSSEC is a flaw too! Once I watched a keynote from Daniel J. Bernstein at FISL pointing out all the flaws that make DNSSEC vulnerable. So he pointed to a better solution called DNSCurve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSCurve

Sweden Innovates

[ptudor]

So, there's OpenDNSSEC to automate deployments; I strongly suggest spending the time to watch the .SE NIC's nine-part training videos from 2010 at Youtube to improve one's understanding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl3gdM5tDTo

Some respected members of our community dismiss DNSSEC. This video of DJB presents an opinion: DJB at 27C3