Pentagon Searches for ‘Digital DNA’ to Identify Hackers

One of the trickiest problems in cyber security is trying to figure who’s really behind an attack. Darpa, the Pentagon agency that created the Internet, is trying to fix that, with a new effort to develop the “cyber equivalent of fingerprints or DNA” that can identify even the best-cloaked hackers.

The recent malware hit on Google and other U.S. tech firms showed once again just how hard it is to pin a network strike on a particular person or group. Engineers are pretty sure the attack came from China, and it sure was sophisticated enough to come from a state military like China’s. But it’s hard to say conclusively that the People’s Liberation Army launched the strike.

It’s the kind of problem Darpa will try to solve with its “Cyber Genome” project. The idea “is to produce revolutionary cyber defense and investigatory technologies for the collection, identification, characterization, and presentation of properties and relationships from collected digital artifacts of software, data, and/or users,” the agency announced late Monday.

These “digital artifacts” will be collected from “traditional computers, personal digital assistants, and/or distributed information systems such as ‘cloud computers’,” as well as “from wired or wireless networks, or collected storage media. The format may include electronic documents or software (to include malicious software - malware).”

Ultimately, Darpa wants to develop the “digital equivalent of genotype, as well as observed and inferred phenotype in order to determine the identity, lineage, and provenance of digital artifacts and users.”

“In other words,” The Register’s Lew Page notes, “any code you write, perhaps even any document you create, might one day be traceable back to you - just as your DNA could be if found at a crime scene, and just as it used to be possible to identify radio operators even on encrypted channels by the distinctive ‘fist’ with which they operated their Morse keys. Or something like that, anyway.”

The Cyber Genome project kicks off this week with a conference in Virginia.

[Photo: NASA]

By Noah Shachtman

The Internet is about to get a lot safer!

DNS, the Domain Name System, is one of the major pillars of the Internet. It’s a critical service, and without it we would all have to use IP addresses instead of handy domain names like “Pingdom.com” when we want to visit websites, send emails, and so on.

However, DNS has a huge flaw. Because DNS lacks security features it has been relatively easy for hackers to trick DNS servers with false information. By tricking DNS servers, hackers have been able to hijack entire websites. Needless to say, attacks such as these are a security nightmare and can be used for a large variety of malicious purposes such as site defacement, phishing, malware installations, and more.

For example, last December (on the 17th) visitors to Twitter.com were redirected to a completely unrelated website for over an hour. All because of compromised DNS servers.

In a step to counter these kinds of threats, a set of security extensions called DNSSEC have been developed. However, actually deploying these security extensions and making them part of the Internet’s DNS infrastructure has proven a long and arduous process with many delays. DNSSEC adoption today is in all practicality pretty much non-existent.

DNS security, the story so far

DNSSEC stands for Domain Name System Security Extensions, and just as its name implies, it adds a layer of security on top of the otherwise unsecure DNS. DNSSEC protects the integrity of DNS data and makes sure that it comes from a verified source.

With DNSSEC, site owners like for example Twitter can certify that they are the true originator of the Twitter.com domain and are therefore a credible source, and end users looking up domain names can verify that the result they get back is from a trusted source (e.g. the real Twitter).

One of the main problems so far has been that for DNSSEC to be a practical viability, it needs to be incorporated in the root zone, in the DNS root servers of the Internet. They are the core DNS servers that all other DNS servers depend on, like the roots of a tree or the foundation of a building. This so far hasn’t been the case.

But next week, this important step is finally about to happen. Or rather, it will start to happen,

DNS security extensions in the root zone

Next week we will enter a testing phase where ICANN, the main organizing body of the Internet, and Verisign, the registry of .com and .net, start adding DNSSEC to the various DNS root servers on the Internet.

Since the root servers are so critical the rollout will be incremental and is planned to last well into May, with plenty of testing of the results in the meantime to make sure that there are no problems. After all, breaking the root zone would essentially break the entire Internet.

Fortunately there isn’t any one single point of failure. There are 13 sets of root servers, numbered from A to M. In total there are about 200 root servers, spread all over the world.

Above: Map of root server locations. (From root-servers.org.)

Providing the testing goes well, the security changes to Internet’s DNS root servers will be made permanent on July 1. At this point security in the root zone will be switched on and we will have taken a big step toward a more secure Internet.

This is actually Big News. There will still be a lot of work to be done to get the entire DNS infrastructure to properly support DNSSEC on all levels, and this will take time, but once DNSSEC is included in the root zone, DNSSEC adoption is predicted to get a huge boost.

Posted in Main on January 19th, 2010 by Pingdom