Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday July 11 2017, @11:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-in-a-name[server]? dept.

While looking at the delegation paths for various top-level domains, Matthew Bryant noticed that the domains of 4 out of 7 nameservers for the .io TLD were available for registration:

It appeared that Gandi's API was returning that multiple .io nameserver domains were available for purchase! This does not necessarily mean you can actually register these domain names however, since in the past I had seen multiple incidents where registries would state a domain name was available but wouldn't allow the actual registration to go through due to the domain name being "reserved".

But when he tried anyway, his order went through, and after the registration finished his server began to receive DNS queries for .io domains.

Given the fact that we were able to take over four of the seven authoritative nameservers for the .io TLD we would be able to poison/redirect the DNS for all .io domain names registered. Not only that, but since we have control over a majority of the nameservers it's actually more likely that clients will randomly select our hijacked nameservers over any of the legitimate nameservers even before employing tricks like long TTL responses, etc to further tilt the odds in our favor.

One mitigating factor that should be mentioned is that the .io TLD has DNSSEC enabled. This means that if your resolver supports it you should be defended from an attacker sending bad/forged DNS data in the way mentioned above. That being said, as mentioned in a previous post DNSSEC support is pretty abysmal and I rarely encounter any support for it unless I specifically set a resolver up that supports it myself.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by WOnder93 on Tuesday July 11 2017, @07:23PM

    by WOnder93 (4684) on Tuesday July 11 2017, @07:23PM (#537751)

    There are a couple of useful services there, though... such as draw.io [www.draw.io].