This week at LWN: Details of the DNS flaw revealed

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on Aug 27, 2008 6:35 AM EDT
LWN.net; By Jake Edge
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Dan Kaminsky spoke to a packed house at Black Hat on 6 August to outline the fundamental flaw he found in the Domain Name System (DNS). Contrary to his hopes, though, the flaw was discovered and publicized before his presentation. The vulnerability is interesting in its own right, but the implications of what can be done with it are staggering. In addition, the "fix" has well understood shortcomings that can still potentially be exploited to poison DNS caches. We reported on the vulnerability in early July, including Kaminsky's request that security folks not publicly speculate about the flaw. As one might guess, that request was largely ignored. When security researcher Halvar Flake published his speculation, another researcher, who was known to have the details of the flaw, publicly confirmed it, but just as quickly removed the confirmation. While it sounds a bit like a security community soap opera, it was fairly clearly caused by the attempt to contain the vulnerability information.

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