Forward to Hell? On the Potentials of Misusing Transparent DNS Forwarders in Reflective Amplification Attacks

Publikation: Beitrag in Buch/Konferenzbericht/Sammelband/GutachtenBeitrag in KonferenzbandBeigetragenBegutachtung

Beitragende

Abstract

The DNS service infrastructure is infamous for facilitating reflective amplification attacks. Various countermeasures including server shielding, access control, rate limiting, and protocol restrictions have been implemented. Still, the threat remains throughout the deployment of DNS servers. In this paper, we report on and evaluate the widely unnoticed threat that derives from transparent DNS forwarders, a widely deployed incompletely functional set of DNS components. DNS transparent forwarders guide DNS requests non-recursively, i.e., without rebuilding packets with correct source addresses. As such, transparent forwarders feed arbitrary DNS requests into (mainly powerful and anycasted) open recursive resolvers, which in the case of misuse participate unwillingly in distributed reflective amplification attacks. We show that transparent forwarders raise severe threats to the Internet infrastructure. They easily circumvent rate limiting, and achieve an additional, scalable impact via the DNS anycast infrastructure, which we empirically verified up to a factor of 14. Transparent forwarders can also bridge access to shielded recursive resolvers, making these protected infrastructure entities part of the global DNS attack infrastructure.

Details

OriginalspracheEnglisch
TitelProceedings of ACM CCS 2025
Herausgeber (Verlag)ACM New York, NY, USA
Seiten3915--3929
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 22 Nov. 2025
Peer-Review-StatusJa

Konferenz

Titel32nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
KurztitelCCS 2025
Veranstaltungsnummer32
Dauer13 - 17 Oktober 2025
Webseite
BekanntheitsgradInternationale Veranstaltung
OrtTaipei International Convention Center
StadtTaipei
LandTaiwan

Externe IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-3825-2807/work/197965505

Schlagworte

Fächergruppen, Lehr- und Forschungsbereiche, Fachgebiete nach Destatis

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