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This draft does not describe Kaminsky's attack; it describes the vanilla Birthday Attack from 2002. Kaminsky's discovery was the combination of random bogus query names and spoofed authority sections, which dramatically expanded the number of "bites at the apple" attackers had to match query IDs from spoofed responses to original requests.

Daniel Bernstein was right in the late 1990s about randomizing source ports, and randomization did effectively foreclose on Kaminsky's vulnerability. But I'm unaware of a cite in which he outlines Kaminsky's attack in any detail. His djbdns countermeasure was a sensible response to BIND's QID prediction problem, which Paul Vixie was reluctant to fix because the QID only gave him 16 bits of randomness to work with.

I'm not saying you're certainly wrong that other people had discovered the random-name / authority spoofing attack Kaminsky came up with, only that I'm intimately familiar with this whole line of security research and I'm unaware of a source laying it out --- I am thus skeptical of the claim.



I think you're talking past each other and saying the same thing. There never was a Kaminsky bug. There was no new vulnerability. There was a new attack.

Kaminsky figured out how to build a much more practical way to exploit what was known already. This was very significant, and it's one of the ultimate examples of PoC||GTFO finally triggering action. He deserves a lot of credit.


Sure! I feel like repeated spoofing bids through authority records on responses to random in-bailiwick queries is a novel protocol vulnerability but wouldn't die on the hill of it being instead a new class of attack; we all agree that inadequate randomness is the original sin here.




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