ICANN announced the IANA Interim Trust Anchor Repository as a not-quite-yet-production service today. The ITAR is useful to people running validating resolvers until the root zone gets signed. It currently includes trust anchors for three ccTLDs (BR, CZ, SE) and the eleven experimental IDN TLDs operated by ICANN. IANA's policy is to only publish DS records in the ITAR. BIND users won't be able to import the ITAR anchors file directly since BIND currently takes only DNSKEY's as trust anchors.

OARC is coordinating collection of DNS packet captures to assist researchers and security groups increase our understanding of some recent DDoS attacks (against ISPrime in particular). We'd like your help. You can help out by running the following shell script on nameservers that are receiving spoofed queries:

#!/bin/sh
#
# tcpdump-to-oarc.sh
#
# This script captures DNS packets related to an ongoing
# DDoS attack and uploads them to DNS-OARC.  Current
# version can be found at https://www.dns-oarc.net/node/171

# You can set FROM to whatever you like.

OL.foo LI { margin-bottom:1ex;} UL.foo LI { margin-bottom:1ex;} Note: you can skip ahead to BIND fixes.

---

Recently the hosting company ISPrime became the victim of a DNS-based DDoS attack using spoofed source addresses.

Great news everyone! Matt Larson and Cricket Liu are resurrecting their Ask Mr. DNS advice column as a podcast:

Sadly, after Acme’s acquisition by VeriSign in 2000, Mr. DNS began the downward spiral into dissolution and iniquity so familiar to those in the public eye. When Matt and Cricket tracked Mr.

A number of years ago I did some simulations and measurements to show how different DNS resolvers distribute their queries to a set of authoritative servers (see PAM 2004 paper and NANOG29 presentation). At that time I tested BIND, Windows, DJBDNS, and CNS. Recently someone asked if I know the behavior for PowerDNS.

While working on the TLDmon plugins a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that a certain query to b.iana-servers.net was consistenly failing:

$ dig +bufsiz=2048 @b.iana-servers.net XN--9T4B11YI5A RRSIG

; >> DiG 9.3.5-P2 >> +bufsiz=2048 @b.iana-servers.n

In his Who Protects The Internet? article, Matt Rutherford mentions something near and dear to us as an example of hackers, er, citizens protecting the Internet:

Just look at Dan Kaminsky, a computer consultant who discovered a fundamental flaw in DNS, allowing him control over any website online. This flaw was astounding in what it gave access to – yet Dan Kaminsky didn’t turn to a government agency or organization, or abuse the hack himself.

On October 9, 2008, the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration solicited public comments on the deployment of DNSSEC. Yesterday was the deadline for submission and today all of the comments have been published. Looks like slightly over 53 comments (of varying coherence) were received.

Eric Osterweil gave an interesting talk at the NANOG44 DNSSEC BOF. His data (shown below) from SecSpider indicates a significant increase in signed zones right around the time that CERT VU #800113 was released:

Last week David Conrad of ICANN asked if I could make DSC show the EDNS buffer sizes advertized by clients. This is now available in DSC versions dated after 2008-08-22.