There was something of a mystery this week, with the c.root-servers.net root DNS server falling out of sync with it’s 12 siblings. That’s odd in itself, as these are the 13 servers that keep DNS working for the whole Internet. And yes, that’s a bit of a simplification, it’s not a single server for any of the 13 entities — the C “server” is actually 12 different machines. The intent is for all those hundreds of servers around the world to serve the same DNS information, but over several days this week, the “C” servers just stopped pulling updates.

The most amusing/worrying part of this story is how long it took for the problem to be discovered and addressed. One researcher cracked a ha-ha-only-serious sort of joke, that he had reported the problem to Cogent, the owners of the “C” servers, but they didn’t “seem to understand that they manage a root server”. The problem first started on Saturday, and wasn’t noticed til Tuesday, when the servers were behind by three days. Updates started trickling late Tuesday or early Wednesday, and by the end of Wednesday, the servers were back in sync.

Cogent gave a statement that an “unrelated routing policy change” both affected the zone updates, and the system that should have alerted them to the problem. It seems there might room for an independent organization, monitoring some of this critical Internet Infrastructure.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Drama At The C-Level, Escape Injection, And Audits” →