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Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Evaluating Security Risks of the Undelegated Record on DNS Hosting Services

Published: 24 October 2023 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Leveraging DNS for covert communications is appealing since most networks allow DNS traffic, especially the ones directed toward renowned DNS hosting services. Unfortunately, most DNS hosting services overlook domain ownership verification, enabling miscreants to host undelegated DNS records of a domain they do not own. Consequently, miscreants can conduct covert communication through such undelegated records for whitelisted domains on reputable hosting providers. In this paper, we shed light on the emerging threat posed by undelegated records and demonstrate their exploitation in the wild. To the best of our knowledge, this security risk has not been studied before.
    We conducted a comprehensive measurement to reveal the prevalence of the risk. In total, we observed 1,580,925 unique undelegated records that are potentially abused. We further observed that a considerable portion of these records are associated with malicious behaviors. By utilizing threat intelligence and malicious traffic collected by malware sandbox, we extracted malicious IP addresses from 25.41% of these records, spanning 1,369 Tranco top 2K domains and 248 DNS hosting providers, including Cloudflare and Amazon. Furthermore, we discovered that the majority of the identified malicious activities are Trojan-related. Moreover, we conducted case studies on two malware families (Dark.IOT and Specter) that exploit undelegated records to obtain C2 servers, in addition to the masquerading SPF records to conceal SMTP-based covert communication. Also, we provided mitigation options for different entities. As a result of our disclosure, several popular hosting providers have taken action to address this issue.

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    Cited By

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    • (2023)TsuKing: Coordinating DNS Resolvers and Queries into Potent DoS AmplifiersProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3616668(311-325)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
    • (2023)Silence is not Golden: Disrupting the Load Balancing of Authoritative DNS ServersProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3616647(296-310)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023

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    1. Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Evaluating Security Risks of the Undelegated Record on DNS Hosting Services

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        IMC '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference
        October 2023
        746 pages
        ISBN:9798400703829
        DOI:10.1145/3618257
        This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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        Publication History

        Published: 24 October 2023

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        Author Tags

        1. dns hosting service
        2. dns security
        3. domain name system

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        • Short-paper

        Funding Sources

        • National Natural Science Foundation of China
        • National Key R&D Program of China
        • Tsinghua University-China Telecom Corp., Ltd. Joint Research Center for Next Generation Internet Technology Research Fund
        • CCF-Tencent Rhino-Bird Young Faculty Open Research Fund
        • Alibaba Innovative Research Program (AIR)

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        IMC '23
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        IMC '23: ACM Internet Measurement Conference
        October 24 - 26, 2023
        Montreal QC, Canada

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        Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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        November 4 - 6, 2024
        Madrid , AA , Spain

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        • (2023)TsuKing: Coordinating DNS Resolvers and Queries into Potent DoS AmplifiersProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3616668(311-325)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
        • (2023)Silence is not Golden: Disrupting the Load Balancing of Authoritative DNS ServersProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3616647(296-310)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023

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