EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This paper provides a brief overview of basic Domain Name System (DNS) spoofing attacks against DNS client resolvers. Technical challenges are proposed that should help to both identify attempted attacks and prevent them from being successful. Relevant Request for Comments (RFC) guidelines, used by programmers to help ensure their DNS resolver code meets specifications, are reviewed. This results in the realisation that the RFC guidelines are not adequately specific or forceful to help identify or prevent DNS spoofing attacks against DNS client resolvers. Furthermore, the RFC guidelines actually simplify such attacks to a level that has not previously been discussed in the public domain until now. To highlight the consequences of merely conforming to the RFC guidelines without considering security ramifications, an example DNS spoofing attack against the DNS resolver in Microsoft Windows XP is provided. This illustrates serious weaknesses in the Windows XP DNS resolver client implementation. For example, Windows XP will accept a DNS reply as being valid without performing a thorough check that the DNS reply actually matches the DNS request. This allows an attacker to create a malicious generic DNS reply that only needs to meet a couple of criteria with predictable values in order to be accepted as a valid DNS reply by the targeted user. This paper discusses the practical impact of the issues raised, such as the ability to perform a successful and reasonably undetectable DNS spoofing attack against a large target base of Windows XP users, without the attacker requiring knowledge of the DNS requests issued by the targeted users. Finally, a comparison with the DNS resolver in Debian Linux is supplied. The paper can be found at the following URL: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~987654321/impact_of_rfc_on_dns_spoofing.pdf __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
