cipherdyne.org

07 August, 2008

There are several online DNS checker services that are designed to test nameservers to see if they are vulnerable to the Dan Kaminsky DNS cache poisoning attack. These services perform an important function considering 1) the ease with which vulnerable servers can be exploited, and 2) the critical place DNS has in the Internet infrastructure. If you have not yet checked the nameserver you use for DNS resolution or switched to OpenDNS, let's just say that it is highly recommended, and Dan's talk at the Blackhat Briefings today drove home just how bad the problem is. Dan presented a nice visualization of how much effort has gone into the worldwide patching effort so far, but there is still a lot of work to do.

Online DNS checker services are handy, but unfortunately, not all of these DNS services work the same, and this blog post shows that certain flavors of NAT can make some of these services report nameservers as vulnerable when they really aren't.

Spoiler: The Doxpara and DNS-OARC services handle the NAT case properly by testing against multiple upstream nameservers, whereas the Metasploit test does not yet handle this (although I'm sure it won't be long before this is taken care of).

One of the main requirements for successfully exploiting a vulnerable nameserver is that the source port the server uses for recursive queries must be predictable by the attacker. It's not too difficult for an attacker to profile a potential target by issuing a series of DNS requests for random hostnames (and therefore not cached) in a domain under the attacker's control. Then, by watching how the targeted nameserver issues requests to the authoritative nameserver (controlled by the attacker), it is easy to check whether the source port seems randomly chosen or not. However, if the attacker is only using one authoritative nameserver, this limits the attacker to asking the question:

Are the source ports for recursive queries from the target to a single authoritative nameserver predictable?

...instead of:

Are the source ports for recursive queries from the target across a range of authoritative nameservers predictable?

(For the remainder of this discussion, we'll assume that a targeted nameserver is behind a NAT device, and all recursive DNS requests traverse this device.) The crux of the problem - from the viewpoint of an attacker - is that NAT devices do not always use the same strategy for translating UDP source ports. If the NAT always leaves the source port intact, then there is no problem, and the attacker only needs one authoritative DNS server in order to see whether the target randomizes source ports. If the NAT imposes an "n+m" rule, then this is also advantageous to the attacker with only one authoritative nameserver - even if the targeted DNS server randomizes source ports itself. But, if the NAT randomizes source ports according to a rule like "for the next 30 seconds, give all UDP packets with source port 12345 destined for IP1 a new source port of 48567, and all packets to IP2 a new source port of 34432, etc.", then the attacker with only one authoritative nameserver would see that all incoming queries have the same source port (at least for 30 seconds). Given that an actual DNS cache poisoning attack requires spoofed responses from nameservers that are (presumably) not under the control of the attacker, such a NAT device would thwart an attack because it would assign a new (random) port for the set of queries to each authoritative nameserver.

The iptables firewall with it's SNAT --random feature implements a strategy similar to the above, and we show how a few DNS checker services handle this for a targeted nameserver 22.2.2.2 (the IP is for illustration purposes only).

First, Dan's DNS checker reports the following: Your name server, at 22.2.2.2, appears to be safe, but make sure the ports
listed below aren't following an obvious pattern (:1001, :1002, :1003, or
:30000, :30020, :30100...). Requests seen for c26cd2dfd938.doxdns5.com:
22.2.2.2:40796 TXID=27431
22.2.2.2:28530 TXID=7761
22.2.2.2:56025 TXID=64688
22.2.2.2:30711 TXID=37206
22.2.2.2:24472 TXID=84 Good.

Now, DNS OARC reports: [attacker]# dig @22.2.2.2 +short porttest.dns-oarc.net TXT
porttest.y.x.w.v.u.t.s.r.q.p.o.n.m.l.k.j.i.h.g.f.e.d.c.b.a.pt.dns-oarc.net.
"22.2.2.2 is GREAT: 26 queries in 2.5 seconds from 26 ports with std dev 18972" This is also good.

Finally, on the exploit side of things, Metasploit's service reports: [attacker]# ./msfconsole
msf > use auxiliary/spoof/dns/bailiwicked_host
msf auxiliary(bailiwicked_host) > set RHOST 22.2.2.2
RHOST => 22.2.2.2
msf auxiliary(bailiwicked_host) > check
[*] Using the Metasploit service to verify exploitability...
[*] >> ADDRESS: 22.2.2.2 PORT: 44826
[*] >> ADDRESS: 22.2.2.2 PORT: 44826
[*] >> ADDRESS: 22.2.2.2 PORT: 44826
[*] >> ADDRESS: 22.2.2.2 PORT: 44826
[*] >> ADDRESS: 22.2.2.2 PORT: 44826
[*] FAIL: This server uses a static source port and is vulnerable to poisoning
msf auxiliary(bailiwicked_host) > But, the above argument shows that the Metasploit result is a false positive. After seeing such a result, the attacker might continue on with Metasploit and create a ton of DNS queries and spoofed responses, only to have the exploit attempt fail because the source port really isn't predictable for DNS queries issued to nameservers outside the attacker's control.

The prevalence of such NAT deployments is most likely low, but it would make an interesting research project to try and determine how many DNS servers are protected by such a mechanism. However, a key detail is that for testing this is that the DNS servers fundamentally must still select the same source port for recursive queries since if not then the iptables SNAT --random option will be more random (even for rapid sets of recursive queries). Source port randomization is exactly one of the things the patches to DNS servers is designed to address, so the opportunity to perform such research is closing. Also, hopefully no one is still setting query-source address * port within the named.conf file.

Update: 08/09/08 Jeff Jarmoc mentioned to me that the implementations of NAT on Cisco and Check Point devices can de-randomize source ports of services running on internal networks, and this problem even affects DNS servers that have been patched. That is an important point, and the problem was also noted in this blog post. The vendors are patching the issue, but there is a lot of work left.