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DNSSEC -- authenticated denial of existence : understanding zone enumeration

Sachin Vasant-2014-01-01-OpenBU/Boston University Institutional Repository (Boston University)
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TL;DRAbstract

Over the years DNS has proved to be an integral part of the internet infracstructure. For our purposes, DNS is simply a large scale distributed database that maps human-readable domain names to network recognizable IP addresses. Unfortunately, authenticity of responses was not integral to the initial DNS design. This lead to the possibility of a very practical forgery of responses as displayed by Kaminsky's cache poisoning attacks. DNSSEC is primarily designed as a security extension of DNS, that guarantees authenticity of DNS responses. 
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\nTo answer invalid queries in an authenticated manner, DNSSEC initially employed the NSEC records. To its credit, NSEC allowed nameservers to precompute signatures for such negative responses offline. As a result, NSEC is highly scalable while preserving the authenticity/correctness of responses. But, while doing so, NSEC leaks domains from nameserver's zone. This is called zone enumeration. 
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\nTo counter zone enumeration, NSEC3

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Over the years DNS has proved to be an integral part of the internet infracstructure. For our purposes, DNS is simply a large scale distributed database that maps human-readable domain names to network recognizable IP addresses. Unfortunately, authenticity of responses was not integral to the initial DNS design. This lead to the possibility of a very practical forgery of responses as displayed by Kaminsky's cache poisoning attacks. DNSSEC is primarily designed as a security extension of DNS, that guarantees authenticity of DNS responses. 
\n
\nTo answer invalid queries in an authenticated manner, DNSSEC initially employed the NSEC records. To its credit, NSEC allowed nameservers to precompute signatures for such negative responses offline. As a result, NSEC is highly scalable while preserving the authenticity/correctness of responses. But, while doing so, NSEC leaks domains from nameserver's zone. This is called zone enumeration. 
\n
\nTo counter zone enumeration, NSEC3

Keywords

EnumerationDenialComputer securityComputer scienceGeographyMathematicsPsychologyCombinatorics

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