DNS Vulnerabilities Expose Millions of Internet-Connected Devices to Attack

Researchers uncover a fresh set of nine vulnerabilities in four TCP/IP stacks that are widely used in everything from powerful servers and firewalls to consumer IoT products.

Tens of millions of Internet connected devices — including medical equipment, storage systems, servers, firewalls, commercial network equipment, and consumer Internet of Things (IoT) products — are open to potential remote code execution and denial-of-service attacks because of vulnerable DNS implementations.

A new study that Forescout Research Labs and JSOF Research conducted recently has uncovered a set of nine vulnerabilities in four TCP/IP stacks present in billions of devices worldwide. The four stacks in which the vulnerabilities exist are FreeBSD, Nucleus NET, NetX, and IPnet.  

“These vulnerabilities affect many devices because of the widespread nature of implementations in TCP/IP stacks,” says Daniel dos Santos, research manager at Forescout. Significantly, such vulnerabilities are likely to be more widespread than just on TCP/IP stacks, he says. “Any software that processes DNS packets may be affected, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and other network appliances,” dos Santos says. “That is why we are releasing tools for other researchers and developers to find and fix these problems.”

FreeBSD is used in many high-performance servers, printers, firewalls, and embedded systems deployed on IT networks around the world, including at major companies such as Yahoo and Netflix. Nucleus NET is part of Nucleus RTOS, a real-time operating system from Siemens that is used in many industrial systems, medical, automation, and airborne systems. The OS is most commonly found in devices used for building automation and in operational technology and VoIP environments. NetX is commonly run by ThreadX, a real-time operating system found in many medical devices, energy equipment, printers, and power equipment in industrial control system environments. Meanwhile, the vulnerability that Forescout and JSOF discovered in IPnet was previously discovered by other researchers and quietly fixed, so it presents a smaller threat that the other flaws.

In a new technical report, Forescout and JSOF describe the set of nine vulnerabilities they discovered as giving attackers a way to knock devices offline or to download malware on them in order to steal data and disrupt production systems in operational technology environments. Among the most affected are organizations in the healthcare and government sectors because of the widespread use of devices running the vulnerable DNS implementations in both environments, Forescout and JSOF say.

According to the two companies, patches are available for the vulnerabilities in FreeBSD, Nucleus NET, and NetX. Device vendors using the vulnerable stacks should provide updates to customers. But because it may not always be possible to apply patches easily, organizations should consider mitigation measures, such as discovering and inventorying vulnerable systems, segmenting them, monitoring network traffic, and configuring systems to rely on internal DNS servers, they say. The two companies also released tools that other organizations can use to find and fix DNS implementation errors in their own products.

Device vendors often do not issue patches for vulnerabilities that affect third-party components that are integrated with other software in their products, dos Santos says. “Even if patches are issued, they have to be applied to devices that are difficult or impossible to take offline because they are mission-critical,” he says, pointing to medical devices and industrial control systems as examples.

Message Compression
Forescout and JSOF discovered the nine vulnerabilities while conducting a study on underlying security problems in Doman Name System implementations. The study was part of a broader research effort called “Project Memoria” that Forescout has been leading to understand the security of TCP/IP stacks. The effort has led to the discovery of scores of TCP/IP stack vulnerabilities over the past year. In June 2020, Forescout and JSOF disclosed a set of 19 vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed Ripple20, on the Treck TCP/IP stack. Last December, Forescout disclosed Amnesia:33, a collection of 33 bugs across four open source TCP/IP stacks; and in February 2021, the company announced Number:Jack, a set of nine vulnerabilities in the so-called Initial Sequence Number implementation found in nine TCP/IP stacks.

The latest set of nine vulnerabilities have been collectively labeled Name:Wreck. The two companies uncovered them while analyzing the implementation of what is known as DNS message compression in a total of eight TCP/IP stacks. Four of the stacks turned out to have vulnerabilities ranging in severity from moderate to critical — though not all of the flaws were related to message compression protocol.

Dos Santos explains message compression as a feature of the DNS protocol that allows servers to send shorter messages to save on bandwidth consumption and for other reasons. The protocol historically has been vulnerable because the manner in which the decompression works gives attackers a way to manipulate it, he says. Five of the nine newly disclosed vulnerabilities disclosed resulted from a memory compression issue. The list includes a critical remote code execution (RCE) issue in Nucleus NET, a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw in NetX, and an RCE flaw in FreeBSD.

Three of the flaws — including one of critical severity — exist in Nucleus NET and result from problems with a process called domain name label parsing. “Domain name label parsing is what a DNS client must do when processing a DNS packet received from a server,” dos Santos says. Forescout and JSOF found that in some cases, the length of a label specified in a packet was different from its actual length. In other cases, there were no markers to note the end of a label. “In both cases, the parser may continue reading a packet past a certain point where the label has finished, which can lead it to access protected memory regions and crash a device running this code.” The remaining vulnerability — also in Nucleus NET — is of medium severity and leads to DNS cache poisoning.

The DoS vulnerabilities are easier to exploit than the RCE flaws because the attacker only needs to send malformed packets to crash a device. “The remote code executions are harder because the attacker has to craft a packet in a way that it will hijack the code execution in the device and inject malicious code,” dos Santos says. Pulling off such an attack would require the adversary to have knowledge about the internals of a device and how to fine-tune the attacks for different devices, he says.

Dos Santos says it’s hard to predict how, and how widely, attackers will exploit the newly disclosed flaws. But there have been numerous attacks leveraging similar weaknesses in DNS servers previously, he says. As examples, Santos points to a 2018 attack on an Amazon service that redirected users of cryptocurrency websites to malicious domains, and a DNS server hijacking campaign in 2019 that aimed at government agencies around the world. “The vulnerabilities we are presenting now affect DNS clients,” he says, “which is a somewhat overlooked part of DNS security that also allows for severe attacks.”

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year … View Full Bio

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