HITB Throwback Thursday: The Endless Battle to Secure DNS
By: Weixien Toh
If the internet was a territory, then the DNS is its map; if DNS had a father, then it is none other than Dr Paul Vixie. He has even left instructions that in case he perishes, “run your own recursive DNS” should be written on his tombstone.
Over decades, Dr Vixie believes that centralisation is not and never was necessary or beneficial for DNS, and the cost of it will be more surveillance, more fragility, more complexity, and more security bypasses.
DNS underpins so much of the function of the internet and internet security activity today. For this, Paul noted there has been an on-going 3-year battle for control over the DNS resolution path, and this war is heating up now that many hackers, companies, and national security groups have begun to appreciate the way that DNS can be a control and monitoring point. To retain any safety, the rest of the technically inclined aka hacker community and other online communities must now also learn the powers and more importantly, dangers of DNS.
From creating DNS to defending it from exploitation, Paul is one of the engineers who designed the original protocols for DNS. For decades, he has been making the internet safer by designing, implementing, and deploying several DNS protocol extensions and applications that are used throughout the Internet today, including dynamic update and network reputation.
Dr. Vixie has been contributing to Internet protocols and UNIX systems as a protocol designer and software architect since the 1980s. He wrote Cron (for BSD and Linux), and is considered the primary author and technical architect of BIND 4.9 and BIND 8, and of many internet standards documents concerning DNS and DNSSEC. BIND, which stands for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, is the most widely used DNS software on the Internet, and on UNIX-like systems it is the de facto standard.
He was inducted into the internet Hall of Fame in 2014 for work related to DNS and anti-spam technologies. He created the first system that used DNS as a database for reputation information, and more recently, for response policy and rate limiting.
He has spoken on stage at two HITB Conferences – once in 2010 and again in 2012 where he talked about the importance of keeping DNS safe and not letting it fall into the wrong hands because like the internet, DNS is a double-edged sword that benefits the good and is easily exploited by the bad.
Hear first hand from Dr. Vixie about his on-going work in securing this critical piece of internet infrastructure next month at HITB⁺CyberWeek where he will deliver a keynote titled The War for Control of DNS Encryption. Dr. Vixie will explain the original problem, describe the protocol-level solutions, and show how vendors like Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple are deploying these technologies across their product lines. Register now and tune in to Dr. Vixie’s keynote on the 19th of November at 9:00 am GMT+4.
