An on-demand defense scheme against DNS cache poisoning attacks

Abstract

The threats of caching poisoning attacks largely stimulate the deployment of DNSSEC. Being a strong but demanding cryptographical defense, DNSSEC has its universal adoption predicted to go through a lengthy transition. Thus the DNSSEC practitioners call for a secure yet lightweight solution to speed up DNSSEC deployment while offering an acceptable DNSSEC-like defense. This paper proposes a new On-Demand Defense (ODD) scheme against cache poisoning attacks, still using but lightly using DNSSEC. In the solution, DNS operates in DNSSEC-oblivious mode unless a potential attack is detected and triggers a switch to DNSSEC-aware mode. The modeling checking results demonstrate that only a small DNSSEC query load is needed by the ODD scheme to ensure a small enough cache poisoning success rate.