Dan Kaminsky Finally Outlines DNS Vulnerability

Dan Kaminsky finally outlined the DNS vulnerability that was reported about 4 weeks ago (article on The Register). It appears to be a DNS forgery variant of DNS cache poisoning. If an attacker of a DNS server can quickly and correctly guess a 16-bit transaction ID, then the attacker will be able to replace DNS entries with their own spoofed ones. There has been one confirmed attack so far, where the attacker caused AT&T subscribers to be re-routed to fake Google pages.

For the curious, you might want to see how safe your ISP's DNS servers are. Try the "Check My DNS" button on Dan Kaminsky's site; or the "Test My DNS" link here. The key here is to see the amount of randomness of transaction IDs and query source ports in your ISP's DNS servers.