DNS Drama Exposed (Dramatically)

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-12/ff_kaminsky?currentPage=all

by olefoo • 18 years ago

62 25 18 years ago

chris11• 18 years ago

I realize this wired, but did they really have to dramatize it so much?. I mean, come on, talking about the possibility of routing the entire .com domain through his laptop? It sounded like something that Robert Ludlum would write.

technoguyrob• 18 years ago

Indeed. The title should have appended: "...dramatically."

tlrobinson4• 18 years ago

They also portray Kaminsky as a pathetic nobody working out of his lonely apartment, when in reality he was already well respected before the DNS flaw discovery.

pg• 18 years ago

The device of having a despised outsider turn out to be a hero is extremely common not just in sci-fi but in heroic tales generally.

What were the odds I'd get to say that twice in one day?

tsally• 18 years ago

> It sounded like something that Robert Ludlum would write.

Or John Markoff?

dangrover• 18 years ago

The article is a lot more fun if you read it to yourself in the movie trailer guy voice.

"In a WORLD where ONE MAN holds the KEY to the entire INTERNET!"

joe_adk• 18 years ago

Don LaFontaine, recently deceased.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_LaFontaine

nickb• 18 years ago

If the information in an email were accidentally copied onto a hard drive, that hard drive would have to be completely erased, Vixie said.

Ridiculous. I doubt Vixie said that.

bprater• 18 years ago

Does anyone have a link detailing the exploit? I'm not a DNS expert, so something easily consumable would be great.

epe• 18 years ago

As a fellow DNS non-expert, I found http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-kaminsky-dns-vuln.htm... to be pretty clear.

dcurtis• 18 years ago

Wow, I learned so much from that article. Thanks for linking it.

tlrobinson4• 18 years ago

Just ask tptacek, I hear he likes to talk about it ;)

(Thomas Ptacek in the article == tptacek on Hacker News)

davidw• 18 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidu is here too, although not as active as tptacek.

tptacek2• 18 years ago

You just made my list, tlrobinson. One name. tlrobinson.

jbyers• 18 years ago

I heartily recommend the author's previous work in Wired, "High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Sea." A bit lower on the drama dial, still quite interesting:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_s...

thenextweb• 18 years ago

Lower on the drama? People get killed in that story, with the reporter present! I remember that story very well. Made an impression on me. more exciting than DNS flaws...

andr• 18 years ago

Technical summary, please?

tlrobinson4• 18 years ago

There's not much technical in this article, just an overly dramatized account of the history of this vulnerability.

Not exactly a "summary", but... http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-kaminsky-dns-vuln.htm...

sireat• 18 years ago

The author would probably make a pretty good screenwriter for Sneakers2. I guess the dictionary word of the day is bombastic...

st3fan• 18 years ago

I think this is a terrible article. Paul Vixie has done nothing to fix this situation. He certainly does not deserve the fame of the article.

Other DNS servers like DJB-DNS and PowerDNS have implemented proper port randomization as part of their design a LONG time ago. As a result of that those servers are completely unaffected by this DNS exploit.

Vixie and his Bind crew ignored the whole thing for a long time until it blew up in their face. Now it it just an excuse to roll out the monster that is called DNSSEC of course. Great marketing.

tlrobinson4• 18 years ago

Well, I'm no expert but it sounds like source port randomization is a bandaid, while DNSSEC is the better lasting solution.

tptacek2• 18 years ago

DNSSEC is a debacle of epic proportions. It has taken over 13 years for that one standards effort to solidify to the point where it is today, which is a "secure DNS" protocol where there is still no real agreement on how to prevent arbitrary people on the Internet from dumping the contents of your zone files.

I predict, without any real evidence to back me up, that DNSSEC is DOA for a simple reason: the total Internetwide deployment of resolver libraries with a "gethostbyname()" interface; none of these libraries can handle transient or "soft" DNS security failures. SSL, a protocol that is far, far easier to deploy and manage than DNSSEC, sees transient errors so often that users are rebelling against the size of the error messages Firefox generates for them. DNSSEC transient failures kill your lookup.

I can give lots of other reasons why DNSSEC isn't going to work, but that's one you might not have thought of.

DNS Drama Exposed (Dramatically)

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