Security vulnerabilities in DNS and DNSSEC

Abstract

We present an analysis of security vulnerabilities in the domain name system (DNS) and the DNS security extensions (DNSSEC). DNS data that is provided by name servers lacks support for data origin authentication and data integrity. This makes DNS vulnerable to man in the middle (MITM) attacks, as well as a range of other attacks. To make DNS more robust, DNSSEC was proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). DNSSEC provides data origin authentication and integrity by using digital signatures. Although DNSSEC provides security for DNS data, it suffers from serious security and operational flaws. We discuss the DNS and DNSSEC architectures, and consider the associated security vulnerabilities