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Another DNS Flaw Found, Patched
Posted by
Soulskill
on Friday January 09, @07:11PM
from the come-and-gone dept.
from the come-and-gone dept.
darthcamaro writes "Remember the big DNS flaw that Dan Kaminsky 'discovered' last year? Well, it looks like another flaw in DNS has just been patched. This time it's an item that affects DNSSEC, which was supposed to be the savior for the Kaminsky flaw. The good news, though, is that this time, the issue is relatively minor and DNS has already been patched. 'The flaw is specific to certain usages of DNSSEC,' Joao Damas, senior programming manager of the ISC told InternetNews. 'It is strongly advised that all BIND DNSSEC deployments update in case they are using the particular pattern affected (DSA keys in some cases) and to prevent coming across the problem in the future unexpectedly.'"
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IT: Massive, Coordinated Patch To the DNS Released 315 comments
tkrabec alerts us to a CERT advisory announcing a massive, multi-vendor DNS patch released today. Early this year, researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered a basic flaw in the DNS that could allow attackers easily to compromise any name server; it also affects clients. Kaminsky has been working in secret with a large group of vendors on a coordinated patch. Eighty-one vendors are listed in the CERT advisory (DOC). Here is the executive overview (PDF) to the CERT advisory — text reproduced at the link above. There's a podcast interview with Dan Kaminsky too. His site has a DNS checker tool on the top page. "The issue is extremely serious, and all name servers should be patched as soon as possible. Updates are also being released for a variety of other platforms since this is a problem with the DNS protocol itself, not a specific implementation. The good news is this is a really strange situation where the fix does not [immediately] reveal the vulnerability and reverse engineering isn't directly possible."
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any relation to the Ubuntu update? (Score:3)
Is this somehow related to the bind DNS updates for ubuntu desktop that got pushed yesterday?
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Your home ubuntu machine or windows machine won't be effected directly by this.
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Only if you're using BIND and DNSSEC (Score:3, Informative)
Otherwise not a problem.
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Good luck!
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> And all my gear doesn't work in Linux.
Been there. =:^(
Luckily, about time W98 (which I was in line for at midnight, after running the IE4 betas and installing IE4 with desktop enhancements on W95) came out, I started playing around with Linux, and soon began to require that any hardware I bought was Linux compatible, so by the time MS gave me that final shove when they decided eXPrivacy was going to require authentication, I had been buying all Linux compatible hardware for a couple years and was fine
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I'm happy not knowing exactly how my car runs and most users are happy not knowing exactly how their operating system runs.
Unless you know everything about absolutely everything in your life, you have no room to talk about people not knowing how their computers work.
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Many, if not most people here take apart stuff and find out how it works for fun. Why, just this weekend, I'll replace a radiator in my wife's van for a fourth of what the repair shop would charge, then later I might compile a new kernel or something. When I'm done, I'm probably gonna treat that old lawn mower to a new magneto, and then later, restart work on my control program for my radio scanner.
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Well most of the time when there are updates the changelog doesn't actually display any text and reads "unable to download changelog". Also, it was just a fucking question!
Figures, BSD trolls strike again..
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Wrong. Updates in distro releases are usually security updates, which should be applied by everyone.
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I guess that OpenBSD doesn't have a decent package manager... Most package managers can figure out what packages are installed on a user's system, then only notify the user about updates to those installed packages. But, I suppose that *everything* is harder over in OpenBSD land.
subject (Score:5, Funny)
This is bad for all those who use DNSSEC. Both of them must be annoyed at the need to their software.
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Are we actually supposed to trust these people? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't have anything to add to my subject.
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Yeah, um... (Score:5, Informative)
That's not a "DNS flaw".
It's an OpenSSL bug that turned out to affect BIND.
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Since the Windows resolver can connect to BIND, and Microsoft didn't release a patch, a well-written Slashdot summary should have read
Re:Yeah, um... (Score:5, Informative)
It's an OpenSSL bug that turned out to affect BIND.
No, it's a misuse of an OpenSSL API from within BIND, so the error is on BIND's side. It's of extremely low impact, though.
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Parent
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Exactly. I was just on the ISC site checking out something else (someone was asking about DNS for MS W2K and I was checking on that), and they said return codes for openSSL function calls weren't being checked in a few places so a verify failure may not have been properly caught. The released patch and downstream updates fix that.
time to dump BIND (Score:2, Informative)
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Make that PowerDNS, and I agree. BIND is a flaming sack of dog shit, and the conflation of DNS with BIND in many people's minds drives me nuts.
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Personally, I use ldapdns [nimh.org], which used to be based on the djbdns code and continues to adopt some ideas from djbdns, The nice thing about ldapdns, though, is that the database store is entirely in LDAP. You change it in LDAP and the changes in the DNS server are instantaneous.
I would consider PowerDNS as well, but ldapdns is also very small, fast and lightweight and it scales well. I don't get the feeling that PowerDNS is so lightweight.
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PowerDNS is actually quite light. They had the good sense to split it into a caching nameserver and a recursing resolver, making two lightweight daemons, rather than a single "does everything" process.
It's also nice because it can suck in BIND zone files if you're stuck with them and don't want to migrate. Good commercial support is also available. The code itself is GPL.
DNS Flaw? (Score:5, Insightful)
"DNS Flaw"? Can we shoot for a bit more accuracy here on Slashdot, since we're all technical enough to understand the details? It's a flaw that affects BIND. And BIND != DNS. I shouldn't have to point that out...
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