A Cache Poisoning Attack Targeting DNS Forwarding Devices
Poison Over Troubled Forwarders: A Cache Poisoning Attack Targeting DNS Forwarding Devices Xiaofeng Zheng∗;†, Chaoyi Lu∗, Jian Peng∗, Qiushi Yang†, Dongjie Zhou§, Baojun Liu∗, Keyu Man‡, Shuang Hao¶, Haixin Duan∗;†∗ and Zhiyun Qian‡ ∗ Tsinghua University, † Qi An Xin Technology Research Institute, § State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, ‡ University of California, Riverside, ¶ University of Texas at Dallas Abstract However, as the DNS ecosystem has evolved dramatically, In today’s DNS infrastructure, DNS forwarders are devices the system now consists of multiple layers of servers [62]. DNS forwarders standing in between DNS clients and recursive resolvers. Specifically, refer to devices standing in be- The devices often serve as ingress servers for DNS clients, tween DNS clients and recursive resolvers. Upon receiving and instead of resolving queries, they pass the DNS requests DNS queries, the devices do not resolve the domain name to other servers. Because of the advantages and several use by themselves, but pass the requests to other servers (e.g., an cases, DNS forwarders are widely deployed and queried by upstream recursive resolver). To name a few use cases, DNS Internet users. However, studies have shown that DNS for- forwarders can serve as convenient default resolvers, load warders can be more vulnerable devices in the DNS infras- balancers for upstream servers, and gateways of access con- tructure. trol. Meanwhile, for clients in a local network, using DNS forwarders can mitigate security risks, as the devices are not In this paper, we present a cache poisoning attack target- directly exposed to Internet attackers [49]. ing DNS forwarders. Through this attack, attackers can in- ject rogue records of arbitrary victim domain names using Because of the advantages, DNS forwarders are fairly a controlled domain, and circumvent widely-deployed cache prevalent devices in the DNS infrastructure.
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