A Novel Zone-Walking Protection for Secure DNS Server

Abstract

A zone walking attack is to get all existing domain information from a secured DNS server. NSEC3 protocol was proposed to defend against zone walking attacks in a secured DNS server, although NSEC3 uses more CPU time. In this paper, the authors have proposed two novel solutions to defend against the zone walking attack by addressing the efficiency issue of secure DNS protocol. They have simulated the proposed solution and analyzed it with different scenarios of the secure DNS server and attackers. The result of the experiment shows that the proposed solution Low Profiling can be effective against zone walking attacks for up to certain server-side and client-side parameters. The work can help researchers to understand how a new approach in the DNSSEC server can defend against zone walking attacks.