Comprehensive DNS Resolver Defenses Against Cache Poisoning
Nicholas C. Weaver · 2008
DNS resolvers are vulnerable to many attacks on their network communication, ranging from blind attacks to full men-in-the-middle. Although a full man-in-the-middle can only be countered with cryptography, there are many layers of defenses which apply to less powerful attackers. Of particular interest are defenses which only require changing the DNS resolvers, not the authoritative servers or the DNS protocols. This document begins with a taxonomy of attacker capabilities and desires, and then discusses defenses against classes of attackers, including detecting non-disruptive attacks, entropy budgeting, detecting entropy stripping, semantics of duplication, and cache policies to eliminate race-until-win conditions. Proposed defenses were evaluated with traces of network behavior.