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Recursive servers, but not proxy servers, affected.

Recursive servers, but not proxy servers, affected.

Posted Jul 9, 2008 12:44 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Recursive servers, but not proxy servers, affected. by nix
Parent article: Dan Kaminsky Discovers Fundamental Issue In DNS: Massive Multivendor Patch Released (Securosis.com)

Its BIND 8-derived, and as far as I can tell it does source port randomization (at least the
source ports it uses on my system, with a pristine glibc 2.7, are randomized, assuming a
sufficiently recent kernel).


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Recursive servers, but not proxy servers, affected.

Posted Jul 10, 2008 12:19 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

I suspect that the glibc stub resolver justs bind its socket to an unspecified port, which is
fairly random after the system has been running for a while (whereas BIND typically starts
shortly after the machine is booted). But an attacker can find out which source port you're
using if you ever send a query to a DNS server they control. If I understand correctly, the
source port needs to be randomised for each query (i.e. the resolver keeps re-binding to
specified random ports).

Recursive servers, but not proxy servers, affected.

Posted Jul 10, 2008 12:30 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Aha. It can't persist the socket but has to re-bind(). OK, glibc's not 
doing that.

(Can you tell I've not done much UDP stuff? I love the Internet: I can let 
my ignorance and incompetence hang out for all to see!)

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