This week we’re starting off with a somber note, as Dan Kaminsky passed at only 42, of diabetic ketoacidosis. Dan made a name for himself by noticing a weakness in DNS response verification that could allow attackers to poison a target DNS resolver’s cache. A theoretical attack was known, where spoofed DNS responses could collide with requests, but Time-To-Live values meant that DNS requests only go out once per eight hours or so. The breakthrough was realizing that the TTL limitation could be bypassed by requesting bogus subdomains, and aiming the spoofed responses at those requests. This simple technique transformed a theoretical attack that would take 87 years to a very real 10 second attack. Check out the period video after the break, where Dan talked about his efforts in getting the problem fixed.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Dan Kaminsky, Banned From Kernel Development, Ransomware, And The Pentagon’s IPv4 Addresses” →