DNS DoS ???

Jon Lewis jlewis at lewis.org
Sat Jul 30 18:44:26 UTC 2011


On Sat, 30 Jul 2011, Drew Weaver wrote:

>> my DNS servers were getting slow so I blocked recursive queries for all 
>> but my own network.
>
> This should be the standard practice.  By operating an open recursor, 
> you lend your DNS server to abuse as a contributor to DNS 
> reflection/amplification attacks.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> And at this point he may as well just ACL in-front of the recursors to 
> prevent the traffic from hitting the servers thus reducing load needed 
> to reject the queries on the servers themselves.

An awful lot of older/smaller deployments have single servers doing both 
authoratative and recursive DNS.  These should be setup with either an 
allow-recursion { ACL;} statement or separate authoratative and recursive 
views limiting recursion to just those networks that should be sending 
recursive queries.

Another option is to run separate services bound to different individual 
IPs on the server.  i.e. bind9 or powerdns for authoratative DNS and 
unbound for recursion.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
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