Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Venugopalan Ramasubramanian, Emin Gun Sirer. "Perils of Transitive Trust in the Domain Name System". Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), October, 2005.

Abstract
The Domain Name System, DNS, is based on nameserver delegations, which introduce complex and subtle dependencies between names and nameservers. In this paper, we present results from a large scale survey of DNS, and show that these dependencies lead to a highly insecure naming system. We report specically on three aspects of DNS security: the properties of the DNS trusted computing base, the extent and impact of existing vulnerabilities in the DNS infrastructure, and the ease with which attacks against DNS can be launched. The survey shows that a typical name depends on 46 servers on average, whose compromise can lead to domain hijacks, while names belonging to some countries depend on a few hundred servers. An attacker exploiting well-documented vulnerabilities in DNS nameservers can hijack more than 30% of the names appearing in the Yahoo and DMOZ.org directories. And certain nameservers, especially in educational institutions, control as much as 10% of the namespace.

Electronic downloads

• dnssurvey.pdf · application/pdf · 203 kbytes

• HTML

  Venugopalan Ramasubramanian, Emin Gun Sirer. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/175.html"
  >Perils of Transitive Trust in the Domain Name
  System</a>, Proceedings of Internet Measurement
  Conference (IMC), Internet Measurement Conference (IMC),
  October, 2005.

• Plain text

  Venugopalan Ramasubramanian, Emin Gun Sirer. "Perils of
  Transitive Trust in the Domain Name System".
  Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference (IMC),
  Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), October, 2005.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{RamasubramanianSirer05_PerilsOfTransitiveTrustInDomainNameSystem,
      author = {Venugopalan Ramasubramanian and Emin Gun Sirer},
      title = {Perils of Transitive Trust in the Domain Name
                System},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference
                (IMC)},
      organization = {Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)},
      month = {October},
      year = {2005},
      abstract = {The Domain Name System, DNS, is based on
                nameserver delegations, which introduce complex
                and subtle dependencies between names and
                nameservers. In this paper, we present results
                from a large scale survey of DNS, and show that
                these dependencies lead to a highly insecure
                naming system. We report specically on three
                aspects of DNS security: the properties of the DNS
                trusted computing base, the extent and impact of
                existing vulnerabilities in the DNS
                infrastructure, and the ease with which attacks
                against DNS can be launched. The survey shows that
                a typical name depends on 46 servers on average,
                whose compromise can lead to domain hijacks, while
                names belonging to some countries depend on a few
                hundred servers. An attacker exploiting
                well-documented vulnerabilities in DNS nameservers
                can hijack more than 30% of the names appearing in
                the Yahoo and DMOZ.org directories. And certain
                nameservers, especially in educational
                institutions, control as much as 10% of the
                namespace.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/175.html}
  }
  

Posted by Kelly Patwell on 13 Feb 2007.
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