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DNS Cache Poisoning - The Next Generation
by LURHQ Threat Intelligence Group

Introduction

The old problem of DNS cache poisoning has again reared its ugly head. While some would argue that the domain name system protocol is inherently vulnerable to this style of attack due to the weakness of 16-bit transaction IDs, we cannot ignore the immediate threat while waiting for something better to come along. There are new attacks, which make DNS cache poisoning trivial to execute against a large number of nameservers running today. The purpose of this article is to shed light on these new attacks and recommend ways to defend against them.

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Attack #1 - The Birthday Attack

To perform this attack, one needs to send a sufficient number of queries to a vulnerable nameserver, while sending an equal number of phony replies at the same time. Because the flaw in the BIND software generates multiple queries for the same domain name at the same time, one encounters statistically improved odds of hitting the exact transaction ID. This is the classic "Birthday Attack", which is derived from the "Birthday Paradox", described below:


A birthday attack is a name used to refer to a class of brute-force attacks. It gets its name from the surprising result that the probability that two or more people in a group of 23 share the same birthday is greater than 1/2; such a result is called a birthday paradox.

If some function, when supplied with a random input, returns one of k equally-likely values, then by repeatedly evaluating the function for different inputs, we expect to obtain the same output after about 1.2k1/2. For the above birthday paradox, replace k with 365. (unknown author, http://www.x5.net/faqs/crypto/q95.html)