Security analysis and solution for thwarting cache poisoning attacks in the Domain Name System

• Published in: 2012 19th International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT) pp. 1 - 6
• Main Authors: Bassil, R., Hobeica, R., Itani, W., Ghali, C., Kayssi, A., Chehab, A.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-04-2012
• Subjects: Computer crime; DNS; DNS cache poisoning; DNS security; Identity-Based Encryption; IP networks; man-in-the-middle attacks; Protocols; Public key; Servers; spoofing attacks
• ISBN: 1467307459; 9781467307451
• DOI: 10.1109/ICTEL.2012.6221233

The Domain Name System is a crucial part of the Internet's infrastructure, as it provides basic information that is vital for the proper operation of the Internet. The importance of DNS has caused it to be targeted by malicious attackers who are interested in causing damage and gaining personal benefits. Thus nowadays, DNS faces many security threats such as DNS spoofing and cache poisoning attacks. This paper presents S-DNS, an efficient security solution for thwarting cache poisoning attacks in the DNS hierarchy. The contribution of the S-DNS protocol lies in: (1) decreasing the success probability of DNS spoofing and cache poisoning by preventing man-in-the-middle attacks, (2) providing a backward compatible and simple security solution with low computation and communication overheads, (3) targeting the different DNS query interaction models from iterative, recursive, and caching schemes, and (4) employing an efficient Identity-Based Encryption key management scheme that relieves the different DNS interacting entities from the burden and complexities of traditional public-key infrastructures.