ICANN DNS Symposium | November 2022

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Phoenix Domain, a general and novel attack that allows adversaries to maintain the revoked malicious domain continuously resolvable at scale, which enables an old, mitigated attack, Ghost Domain. Phoenix Domain has two variations and affects all mainstream DNS software and public DNS resolvers overall because it does not violate any DNS specifications and best security practices. The attack is made possible through systematically “reverse engineer” the cache operations of 8 DNS implementations, and new attack surfaces are revealed in the domain name delegation processes. We select 41 well-known public DNS resolvers and prove that all surveyed DNS services are vulnerable to Phoenix Domain, including Google Public DNS and Cloudflare DNS. Extensive measurement studies are performed with 210k stable and distributed DNS recursive resolvers, and results show that even after one month from domain name revocation and cache expiration, more than 25% of recursive resolvers can still resolve it. The proposed attack provides an opportunity for adversaries to evade the security practices of malicious domain take-down. We have reported discovered vulnerabilities to all affected vendors and suggested 6 types of mitigation approaches to them. Until now, 7 DNS software providers and 15 resolver vendors, including BIND, Unbound, Google, and Cloudflare, have confirmed the vulnerabilities, and some of them are implementing and publishing mitigation patches according to our suggestions. In addition, 9 CVE numbers have been assigned. The study calls for standardization to address the issue of how to revoke domain names securely and maintain cache consistency.

Date
Nov 15, 2022 9:00 AM — Nov 16, 2022 4:45 PM
Location
Brussels Marriott Hotel Grand Place
Rue Auguste Orts 3-7, Brussels, 1000

In the 5th ICANN DNS Symposium (IDS 2022), I presented my NDSS ‘23 paper Phoenix Domain to the audiences. Discussed with so many enthusiastic question askers.

Xiang Li
Xiang Li
Associate Professor (Nankai University)

Xiang Li is an Associate Professor at the College of Cyber Science, Nankai University. He is the advisor of Nankai University’s CTF teams, an ACM member, CCF member, and CIC member. He serves as PC for top-tier venues like IMC 2025 and others like AsiaCCS 2025. His research interests include network security, protocol security, IPv6 security, DNS security, Internet measurement, network & protocol fuzzing, network vulnerability discovery & attack, web security, and underground economy with 18 research papers. As the first author, he has published many research papers at all top-tier security conferences, including Oakland S&P, USENIX Security, CCS, NDSS, and Black Hat (Asia, USA, and Europe). He applied for 11 patents (1 authorized and 5 in checking as the first author). He has obtained over 200 CVE/CNVD/CNNVD vulnerability numbers, more than $11,600 rewards, 370+ GitHub stars, multiple CERT reports, 100+ news coverage, and RFC acknowledgement. He got multiple prizes, such as 2024 ACM SIGSAC China Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2024 Pwnie Award Nominations (Hacker Oscar), 1st prize of IPv6 Technology Application Innovation Competition, 2nd prize of GeekCon 2023 DAF Contest, National Scholarship, Wang Dazhong Scholarship, Tsinghua Outstanding Scholarship, Outstanding Graduate, and Extraordinary Hacker of GeekCon International 2024.