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Securing The Steering Wheel Of The Internet

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Securing the Steering Wheel of the Internet

Yousif Hussin
Student ID: 23048362

MSc Information Systems Security
Systems and Applications Security

Table of Contents
Abstract: 3
Introduction: 3
The Attack Surface of the DNS System: 4
Development Timeline of a Secure BIND DNS Server Implementation: 5
Zone Transfer Security Issues: 5
Software Code Vulnerability - Format String Vulnerability in nslookupComplain() Function (CVE-2001-0013) 6
DNS Cache Poisoning: 7
Advanced DNS Cache Poisoning and the Kaminsky DNS Attack: 8
DNS Server Advanced Protection Techniques 9
DNS Server Operating System Hardening: 9
Authenticated DNS Server-to-Server Communication: 10
The Integrity of DNS Data, and DNSSEC: 11
References 13 …show more content…

Introduction:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the system (or agent) responsible for resolving Domain Names (such as www.google.com) to IP Addresses (such as 212.0.130.23), which is required to make the Internet usable. This resolution list is distributed throughout the Internet in a hierarchy of authority. There 's normally a DNS server hosted by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to serve their clients (Rouse 2005). The basic operation of DNS in a single Internet resource request is shown in Figure 1 (AFNIC 2009). It functions like a database that is distributed over DNS machines that interact with each other to be able to respond to a user 's query. The top of the DNS hierarchy contains the top level domains, such as .com, which are controlled by top level DNS servers. The DNS server implementation which is used for this paper is BIND, which is the most widely used DNS server implementation on the Internet today.

The Attack Surface of the DNS System:

The following are the general categories of attacks on DNS Servers, in terms of the nature of the vulnerable target, which give the attacker the ability to impact on the normal behaviour of the DNS Server and the Internet:

• DNS Protocol and Software Bugs specific attacks
• DNS Infrastructure Attacks

The first category of attacks concerns vulnerabilities within the anatomy of the DNS protocol and the software implementation of the protocol. The second category of attacks concerns

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