BIND 9.x Security Technical Implementation Guide

With any network service, there is the potential that an attacker can exploit a vulnerability within the program that allows the attacker to gain control of the process and even run system commands with that control. One possible defense against this attack is to limit the software to particular quarantined areas of the file system, memory or both. This effectively restricts the service so that it will not have access to the full file system. If such a defense were in place, then even if an attacker gained control of the process, the attacker would be unable to reach other commands or files on the system. This approach often is referred to as a padded cell, jail, or sandbox. All of these terms allude to the fact that the software is contained in an area where it cannot harm either itself or others. A more technical term is a chroot(ed) directory structure. BIND should be configured to run in a padded cell or chroot(ed) directory structure.

Without the capability to generate audit records, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident, or identify those responsible for one. The actual auditing is performed by the OS/NDM, but the configuration to trigger the auditing is controlled by the DNS server. The list of audited events is the set of events for which audits are to be generated. This set of events is typically a subset of the list of all events for which the system is capable of generating audit records. The DoD has defined the list of events for which the application will provide an audit record generation capability as the following: (i) Successful and unsuccessful attempts to access, modify, or delete privileges, security objects, security levels, or categories of information (e.g., classification levels); (ii) Access actions, such as successful and unsuccessful logon attempts, privileged activities or other system-level access, starting and ending time for user access to the system, concurrent logons from different workstations, successful and unsuccessful accesses to objects, all program initiations, and all direct access to the information system; and (iii) All account creation, modification, disabling, and termination actions. The DoD has defined the data which the application will provide an audit record generation capability for an event as the following: (i) Establish the source of the event; (ii) The outcome of the event; and (iii) Identify the application itself as the source of the event. Without establishing the source of the event, it is impossible to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. Associating information about the source of the event within the application provides a means of investigating an attack, recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds, or identifying an improperly configured application. Without information about the outcome of events, security personnel cannot make an accurate assessment about whether an attack was successful or if changes were made to the security state of the system. Event outcomes can include indicators of event success or failure and event-specific results (e.g., the security state of the information system after the event occurred). As such, they also provide a means to measure the impact of an event and help authorized personnel to determine the appropriate response." Failure to a known state can address safety or security in accordance with the mission/business needs of the organization. Failure to a known secure state helps prevent a loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability in the event of a failure of the information system or a component of the system. Preserving application state information helps to facilitate application restart and return to the operational mode of the organization with less disruption to mission-essential processes. The DNS server should be configured to generate audit records whenever a self-test fails. The OS/NDM is responsible for generating notification messages related to this audit record. If authorized individuals do not have the ability to modify auditing parameters in response to a changing threat environment, the organization may not be able to effectively respond, and important forensic information may be lost. This requirement enables organizations to extend or limit auditing as necessary to meet organizational requirements. Auditing that is limited to conserve information system resources may be extended to address certain threat situations. In addition, auditing may be limited to a specific set of events to facilitate audit reduction, analysis, and reporting. Organizations can establish time thresholds in which audit actions are changed, for example, near real-time, within minutes, or within hours. In addition to logging where events occur within the application, the application must also produce audit records that identify the application itself as the source of the event. In order to compile an accurate risk assessment and provide forensic analysis, it is essential for security personnel to know the source of the event, particularly in the case of centralized logging. In the case of centralized logging, the source would be the application name accompanied by the host or client name. Satisfies: SRG-APP-000089-DNS-000004, SRG-APP-000098-DNS-000009, SRG-APP-000099-DNS-000010, SRG-APP-000226-DNS-000032, SRG-APP-000275-DNS-000040, SRG-APP-000353-DNS-000045

DNS software administrators require DNS transaction logs for a wide variety of reasons including troubleshooting, intrusion detection, and forensics. Ensuring that the DNS transaction logs are recorded on the local system will provide the capability needed to support these actions. Sending DNS transaction data to the null channel would cause a loss of important data.

Without the capability to generate audit records, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident, or identify those responsible for one. The actual auditing is performed by the OS/NDM, but the configuration to trigger the auditing is controlled by the DNS server. The list of audited events is the set of events for which audits are to be generated. This set of events is typically a subset of the list of all events for which the system is capable of generating audit records. The DoD has defined the list of events for which the application will provide an audit record generation capability as the following: (i) Successful and unsuccessful attempts to access, modify, or delete privileges, security objects, security levels, or categories of information (e.g., classification levels); (ii) Access actions, such as successful and unsuccessful logon attempts, privileged activities or other system-level access, starting and ending time for user access to the system, concurrent logons from different workstations, successful and unsuccessful accesses to objects, all program initiations, and all direct access to the information system; and (iii) All account creation, modification, disabling, and termination actions.

Auditing and logging are key components of any security architecture. It is essential for security personnel to know what is being performed on the system, where an event occurred, when an event occurred, and by whom the event was triggered, in order to compile an accurate risk assessment. Logging the actions of specific events provides a means to investigate an attack, to recognize resource utilization or capacity thresholds, or to simply identify an improperly configured DNS system. If auditing is not comprehensive, it will not be useful for intrusion monitoring, security investigations, and forensic analysis. The DNS server should audit all failed attempts at server authentication through DNSSEC and TSIG. The actual auditing is performed by the OS/NDM but the configuration to trigger the auditing is controlled by the DNS server. Failing to act on the validation errors may result in the use of invalid, corrupted, or compromised information. The validation of bindings can be achieved, for example, by the use of cryptographic checksums. Validations must be performed automatically. The DNS server does not have the capability of shutting down or restarting the information system. The DNS server can be configured to generate audit records when anomalies are discovered. Satisfies: SRG-APP-000350-DNS-000044, SRG-APP-000474-DNS-000073, SRG-APP-000504-DNS-000074, SRG-APP-000504-DNS-000082

Auditing and logging are key components of any security architecture. It is essential for security personnel to know what is being performed on the system, where an event occurred, when an event occurred, and by whom the event was triggered, in order to compile an accurate risk assessment. Logging the actions of specific events provides a means to investigate an attack, recognize resource utilization or capacity thresholds, or to simply identify an improperly configured DNS implementation. Without log records that aid in the establishment of what types of events occurred and when those events occurred, there is no traceability for forensic or analytical purposes, and the cause of events is severely hindered.

Without establishing when events occurred, it is impossible to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident. Associating event types with detected events in the application and audit logs provides a means of investigating an attack, recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds, or identifying an improperly configured application. In order to compile an accurate risk assessment and provide forensic analysis, it is essential for security personnel to know when events occurred (date and time).

Without establishing where events occurred, it is impossible to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident. Associating information about where the event occurred within the application provides a means of investigating an attack, recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds, or identifying an improperly configured application. In order to compile an accurate risk assessment and provide forensic analysis, it is essential for security personnel to know where events occurred, such as application components, modules, session identifiers, filenames, host names, and functionality.

Protection of log data includes assuring log data is not accidentally lost or deleted. Backing up audit records to a different system or onto separate media than the system being audited on a defined frequency helps to assure, in the event of a catastrophic system failure, the audit records will be retained. This helps to ensure a compromise of the information system being audited does not also result in a compromise of the audit records.

DNS software administrators require DNS transaction logs for a wide variety of reasons including troubleshooting, intrusion detection, and forensics. Ensuring that the DNS transaction logs are recorded on the local system will provide the capability needed to support these actions.

DNS software administrators require DNS transaction logs for a wide variety of reasons including troubleshooting, intrusion detection, and forensics. Ensuring that the DNS transaction logs are recorded on the local system will provide the capability needed to support these actions.

It is important to maintain the integrity of a zone file. The serial number of the SOA record is used to indicate to secondary name server that a change to the zone has occurred and a zone transfer should be performed. The serial number used in the SOA record provides the DNS administrator a method to verify the integrity of the zone file based on the serial number of the last update and ensure that all slave servers are using the correct zone file. When a primary master name server notices that the serial number of a zone has changed, it sends a special announcement to all of the slave name servers for that zone. The primary master name server determines which servers are the slaves for the zone by looking at the list of NS records in the zone and taking out the record that points to the name server listed in the MNAME field of the zone's SOA record as well as the domain name of the local host. When a secondary name server receives a NOTIFY announcement for a zone from one of its configured master name servers, it responds with a NOTIFY response. The response tells the master that the slave received the NOTIFY announcement so that the master can stop sending it NOTIFY announcements for the zone. Then the slave proceeds just as if the refresh timer for that zone had expired: it queries the master name server for the SOA record for the zone that the master claims has changed. If the serial number is higher, the slave transfers the zone. The slave should next issue its own NOTIFY announcements to the other authoritative name servers for the zone. The idea is that the primary master may not be able to notify all of the slave name servers for the zone itself, since it's possible some slaves can't communicate directly with the primary master (they use another slave as their master). Older BIND 8 slaves don't send NOTIFY messages unless explicitly configured to do so.

It is important to maintain the integrity of a zone file. The serial number of the SOA record is used to indicate to secondary name server that a change to the zone has occurred and a zone transfer should be performed. The serial number used in the SOA record provides the DNS administrator a method to verify the integrity of the zone file based on the serial number of the last update and ensure that all slave servers are using the correct zone file. When a primary master name server notices that the serial number of a zone has changed, it sends a special announcement to all of the slave name servers for that zone. The primary master name server determines which servers are the slaves for the zone by looking at the list of NS records in the zone and taking out the record that points to the name server listed in the MNAME field of the zone's SOA record as well as the domain name of the local host. When a secondary name server receives a NOTIFY announcement for a zone from one of its configured master name servers, it responds with a NOTIFY response. The response tells the master that the slave received the NOTIFY announcement so that the master can stop sending it NOTIFY announcements for the zone. Then the slave proceeds just as if the refresh timer for that zone had expired: it queries the master name server for the SOA record for the zone that the master claims has changed. If the serial number is higher, the slave transfers the zone. The slave should next issue its own NOTIFY announcements to the other authoritative name servers for the zone. The idea is that the primary master may not be able to notify all of the slave name servers for the zone itself, since it's possible some slaves can't communicate directly with the primary master (they use another slave as their master). Older BIND 8 slaves don't send NOTIFY messages unless explicitly configured to do so.

Hosts that run the name server software should not provide any other services and therefore should be configured to respond to DNS traffic only. Outgoing DNS messages should be sent from a random port to minimize the risk of an attacker's guessing the outgoing message port and sending forged replies.

All caching name servers must be authoritative for the root zone because, without this starting point, they would have no knowledge of the DNS infrastructure and thus would be unable to respond to any queries. The security risk is that an adversary could change the root hints and direct the caching name server to a bogus root server. At that point, every query response from that name server is suspect, which would give the adversary substantial control over the network communication of the name servers' clients.

A potential vulnerability of DNS is that an attacker can poison a name servers cache by sending queries that will cause the server to obtain host-to-IP address mappings from bogus name servers that respond with incorrect information. The DNS architecture needs to maintain one name server whose zone records are correct and the cache is not poisoned, in this effort the authoritative name server may not forward queries, one of the ways to prevent this, the root hints file is to be deleted. When authoritative servers are sent queries for zones that they are not authoritative for, and they are configured as a non-caching server (as recommended), they can either be configured to return a referral to the root servers or they can be configured to refuse to answer the query. The requirement is to configure authoritative servers to refuse to answer queries for any zones for which they are not authoritative. This is more efficient for the server, and allows it to spend more of its resources doing what its intended purpose is; answering authoritatively for its zone.

The use of CNAME records for exercises, tests, or zone-spanning aliases should be temporary (e.g., to facilitate a migration). When a host name is an alias for a record in another zone, an adversary has two points of attack: the zone in which the alias is defined and the zone authoritative for the alias's canonical name. This configuration also reduces the speed of client resolution because it requires a second lookup after obtaining the canonical name. Furthermore, in the case of an authoritative name server, this information is promulgated throughout the enterprise to caching servers and thus compounds the vulnerability.