• Corpus ID: 18687638

NSA’s MORECOWBELL: Knell for DNS

@inproceedings{Grothoff2015NSAsMK,
  title={NSA’s MORECOWBELL: Knell for DNS},
  author={Christian Grothoff and Matthias Wachs and Monika Ermert},
  year={2015}
}

• Christian Grothoff, Matthias Wachs, Monika Ermert
• Published 2015
• Computer Science

On the net, close to everything starts with a request to the Domain Name System (DNS), a core Internet protocol to allow users to access Internet services by names, such as www.example.com, instead of using numeric IP addresses, like 2001:DB8:4145::4242. Developed in the “Internet good old times” the contemporary DNS is like a large network activity chart for the visually impaired. Consequently, it now attracts not only all sorts of commercially-motivated surveillance, but, as new documents of the NSA spy program MORECOWBELL confirm, also the National Security Agency. Given the design weaknesses of DNS, this begs the question if DNS be secured and saved, or if it has to be replaced — at least for some use cases. In the last two years, there has been a flurry of activity to address security and privacy in DNS at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body that documents the DNS standards. The Internet Architecture Board, peer body of the IETF, just called on the engineers to use encryption everywhere, possibly including DNS. [4] A recent draft [6] by the IETF on DNS privacy starts by acknowledging that the DNS