The Achilles Heal of DNS

One of the four categories of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks list by Scambray, McClure, and Kurtz is 'Routing and DNS attacks.'1 refers to attacks which corrupt the information these systems use to perform their functions. Information Poisoning though more general is a more accurate term for categorizing these types of attacks . It is also more inclusive of attacks such as ARP Poisoning which employ similar tactics and are possible because of a common vulnerability. Each of the protocols associated with these attacks either completely lacks or has very poor methods of authentication. Attackers capitalize on this weakness to undermine the trust relationship between two systems . This paper will attempt to illustrate consequences of this deficiency. Buffer overflows and other attacks on specific software that implement DNS will not be covered.