Perhaps someone has figured it out or just decided to announce it but the big DNS vulnerability that Dan Kaminsky told the world about may have been revealed. Apparently a reverse engineer named Halver Flake was pretty close to figuring out how the vulnerability works. Then someone at Matasano apparently posted the details and then pulled them. Something is going on in the blogosphere…you can find details about the vulnerability on Slashdot and other blogs regarding the post that was on Matasano then removed:
Via McGrew Security:
“Let’s try again to convince Bob that WWW.VICTIM.COM is 6.6.6.0.
This time though, instead of getting Bob to look up WWW.VICTIM.COM and then beating Alice in the race, or getting Bob to look up WWW.EVIL.COM and slipping strychnine into his ham sandwich, we’re going to be clever (sneaky).
Get Bob to look up AAAAA.VICTIM.COM. Race Alice. Alice’s answer is NXDOMAIN, because there’s no such name as AAAAA.VICTIM.COM. Mallory has an answer. We’ll come back to it. Alice has an advantage in the race, and so she likely beats Mallory. NXDOMAIN for AAAAA.VICTIM.COM.
Alice’s advantage is not insurmountable. Mallory repeats with AAAAB.VICTIM.COM. Then AAAAC.VICTIM.COM. And so on. Sometime, perhaps around CXOPQ.VICTIM.COM, Mallory wins! Bob believes CXOPQ.VICTIM.COM is 6.6.6.0!
Poisoning CXOPQ.VICTIM.COM is not super valuable to Mallory. But Mallory has another trick up her sleeve. Because her response didn’t just say CXOPQ.VICTIM.COM was 6.6.6.0. It also contained Additional RRs pointing WWW.VICTIM.COM to 6.6.6.0. Those records are in-bailiwick: Bob is in fact interested in VICTIM.COM for this query. Mallory has combined attack #1 with attack #2, defeating fix #1 and fix #2. Mallory can conduct this attack in less than 10 seconds on a fast Internet link.”
Meanwhile, Dan Kaminsky posted the following on his blog:
“Patch. Today. Now. Yes, stay late. Yes, forward to OpenDNS if you have to. (They’re ready for your traffic.) Thank you to the many of you who already have.”
This might imply that Matasano has the goods…I hope everyone is patched out there! Things are about to get interesting!
EDIT: Thomas over at Matasano has issued a public apology about the post in question.