[IP] more on Big holes in net's heart revealed
Begin forwarded message:
From: brett watson <brett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: April 30, 2006 11:31:37 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Big holes in net's heart revealed
hi dave,
your readers that are not on the dns-operations list might find the
following thread an interesting read related to the cornell project
discussed in this article. the first posting begins here:
http://lists.oarci.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2006-April/000504.html
-b
On Apr 30, 2006, at 5:32 AM, David Farber wrote:
Something "well known" but not advertised till now. djf
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: April 30, 2006 5:11:08 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Big holes in net's heart revealed
Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Big holes in net's heart revealed
By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website
Simple attacks could let malicious hackers take over more than one-
third of the net's sites, reveals research.
The finding was uncovered by researchers who analysed how the net's
addressing system works.
They also found that if the simple attacks were combined with so-
called denial-of-service attacks, 85% of the net becomes vulnerable
to take-over.
The researchers recommended big changes to the net's addressing
system to tackle the vulnerability at its heart.
Site seizing
When you visit a website, such as news.bbc.co.uk, your computer
often asks one of the net's address books, or domain name servers,
for information about where that site resides.
But the number of computers that have to be consulted to find the
computers where that site is located often makes sites vulnerable
to attack by vandals and criminals, found Assistant Professor Emin
Gun Sirer and Venugopalan Ramasubramanian from the Department of
Computer Science at Cornell University.
Professor Sirer told the BBC News website that, on average, 46
computers holding different information about the components of net
addresses are consulted to find out where each dotcom site is
actually hosted.
But, he said, this chain of dependencies between the computers that
look after the different parts of net addresses creates all kinds
of vulnerabilities that clever hackers could easily exploit.
"The growth of the internet has caused these dependencies to
emerge," said Professor Sirer. "Instead of having to compromise one
you can compromise any one of the three dozen."
All the information gathered and analysed by the researchers has to
be publicly available to keep the net's addressing system working.
The research analysed information about almost 600,000 computers.
The research also revealed that 17% of the servers that host the
net's address books are vulnerable to attack via widely known
exploits.
"Because of these dependencies about one-third of the net's names
are trivially compromisable by script kiddies," he said.
One site vulnerable in this way was run by the FBI, said Professor.
Sirer. Although the five computers that act as the first reference
point for the fbi.gov domain were secure, one of the five that
connect to these has yet to install a patch for a well-known bug.
That computer was fixed after the Cornell team reported its
findings to the FBI, but hundreds of thousands of sites suffer from
similar problems.
The most vulnerable net domain found by the survey was that of the
Roman Catholic Church in the Ukraine.
Criminals such as phishing gangs would be interested in re-
directing traffic from well-known sites so they can grab key login
and personal details that would help them de-fraud web users.
[snip]
Story from BBC NEWS:
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/4954208.stm>
Published: 2006/04/28 13:58:07 GMT
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as brett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-
people/
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/