Web-Wide DNS Vulnerability Leaked

The details of the security flaw in Domain Name Server, which was announced by researcher Dan Kaminsky earlier this month, are now out on the Web.

Kaminsky briefed vendors at the beginning of the month on the vulnerability, which affects DNS servers across the entire Internet. Together, the vendors engineered the largest simultaneous security patch in history, and Kaminsky said he would wait 30 days to reveal details of the flaw, giving users more time to patch. The details were scheduled to be released at Kaminsky's presentation at the Black Hat conference on Aug. 6. (See Vendors Issue Massive Simultaneous Patch for Common Internet Flaw.)

Yesterday, however, reverse engineer Halvar Flake took a guess at the vulnerability in his blog. Shortly afterwards, researchers at Matasano Security, which had been briefed on the flaw by Kaminsky himself, posted a detailed analysis of the vulnerability.

Matasano says the posting was an accident and apologized for stealing thunder from Kaminsky, who is scheduled to give a preview of his Black Hat presentation via Webinar tomorrow. The preview was not scheduled to reveal all of the flaw's details.

Researchers in the Metasploit community have already made a posting of the Matasano data, and called for members to develop an exploit of the vulnerability as soon as the end of the day today.

The Matasano posting states that the vulnerability could be exploited in as little as 10 seconds.

Kaminsky has posted a two-line message in his blog, telling users to patch immediately -- presumably an admission that the cat is out of the bag.

— Tim Wilson, Site Editor, Dark Reading