InternetNZ Has Disclosed a Vulnerability That Can Be Weaponized Against Authoritative DNS Servers

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InternetNZ Has Disclosed a Vulnerability That Can Be Weaponized Against Authoritative DNS Servers

By CircleID Reporter
May 06, 2021, 2:53 pm PDT Views: 19,505 Add Comment

New Zealand’s .nz operator, InternetNZ, on Wednesday disclosed a vulnerability against authoritative DNS servers. The vulnerability called TsuNAME was first detected in February 2020 in the .nz registry and found that it could be exploited to carry out Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks across the world.

Some background on the discovery by InternetNZ: “In February 2020, two .nz domains were unintentionally misconfigured with cyclic dependencies, which resulted in a 50% surge in DNS traffic for all .nz infrastructure. Later, this phenomenon was studied and replicated by an international group of researchers from InternetNZ, SIDN Labs (our counterpart from the Netherlands, the organization running .nl), and the University of Southern California Information Science Institute (USC/ISI). Further tests showed that conditions for an attack event are easy to execute, and the consequences are serious.”

“Google Public DNS was the main affected party by this vulnerability,” says InternetNZ’s Chief Scientist Sebastian Castro. “They received a private responsible disclosure from our group in October 2020 and have repaired their code since then. We also reached out to Cisco, whose Public DNS was affected as well, and it is now fixed.”

For further details, visit the dedicated website for the tsuNAME vulnerability.

By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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