DNSSEC and its potential for DDoS attacks
Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Anna Sperotto, Aiko Pras · 2014
Over the past five years we have witnessed the introduction of DNSSEC, a security extension to the DNS that relies on digital signatures. DNSSEC strengthens DNS by preventing attacks such as cache poisoning. However, a common argument against the deployment of DNSSEC is its potential for abuse in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, in particular reflection and amplification attacks. DNS responses for a DNSSEC-signed domain are typically larger than those for an unsigned domain, thus, it may seem that DNSSEC could actually worsen the problem of DNS-based DDoS attacks. The potential for abuse in DNSSEC-signed domains has, however, never been assessed on a large scale.