Posts Tagged ACM

The Collateral Damage of Internet Censorship by DNS Injection (594KB PDF)  by Anonymous, published in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (Volume 42, Number 3, July 2012), looks at  how

Some ISPs and governments (most notably the Great Firewall of China) use DNS injection to block access to “unwanted” websites. The censorship tools inspect DNS queries near the ISP’s boundary routers for sensitive domain keywords and inject forged DNS responses, blocking the users from accessing censored sites, such as twitter and facebook. Unfortunately this causes collateral damage, affecting communication beyond the censored networks when outside DNS traffic traverses censored links.

They point out that the techniques used are similar to Kaminsky-style attacks that can be perpetrated on non-DNSSEC-enabled systems:

In the absence of DNSSEC validation, the resolver will generally accept the faked answer because it arrives earlier than the real one, and, as a result, the access to the sensitive site will be blocked or redirected.

While DNSSEC is not able to guarantee transport of valid queries and responses, the paper goes on to say how it prevents the collateral damage associated with such machinations.