Silence is not Golden: Disrupting the Load Balancing of Authoritative DNS Servers
Fenglu Zhang, Baojun Liu, Eihal Alowaisheq, Jianjun Chen, Chaoyi Lu, Linjian Song, Yong Ma, Ying Liu, Haixin Duan, Min Yang · 2023
Authoritative nameservers are delegated to provide the final resource record. Since the security and robustness of DNS are critical to the general operation of the Internet, domain name owners are required to deploy multiple candidate nameservers for traffic load balancing. Once the load balancing mechanism is compromised, an adversary can manipulate a large number of legitimate DNS requests to a specified candidate nameserver. As a result, it may not only bypass the defense mechanisms used to filter malicious traffic that can overload the victim nameserver, but also lowers the bar for DNS traffic hijacking and cache poisoning attacks.