Kaum ein anderes Element ist so essenziell für das Internet wie das Domain Name System. Ruckelts mal im DNS, reagieren Webseiten und überhaupt alle Internetanwendungen gleich langsamer oder gar nicht. Doch um Fehlerursachen zu ermitteln und zu beseitigen, brauchen Firmen- und Heim-Admins ein weitreichendes Verständnis der Zusammenhänge.
This time (2023) at the yearly Wireshark Developer and User Conference in Europe, I gave a talk about DNS. How could it have been any different –> The title simply had to be ‘It’s Always DNS‘. 😂
“This session dives deeper into the Domain Name System, covering recursive vs. iterative DNS queries, resource records types, TTL & caching, DNS errors, a little DNSSEC, flags, and of course: Wireshark with its useful display filters, custom columns, colouring rules, and so on. And we will explore some other tools to analyze and troubleshoot DNS even further.”
You can watch the whole session and download the slides. And you can do the six challenges at the end of the session as well. (The answers are not in the PDF, but shown in the video.)
We all know the DNS, right? But when we need to troubleshoot it, it’s getting much more complicated than initially thought. DNS ≠ DNS ≠ DNS. And unfortunately: It’s Always DNS.
To get a better understanding of those different kinds of DNS servers (authoritative vs. recursive), DNS messages (recursive, iterative, zone transfer, …) as well as other techniques (conditional forwarding, DoH, …), I draw a poster to have it all at a glance! Here it is:
You probably know already the concept of the Pi-hole. If not: It’s a (forwarding) DNS server that you can install on your private network at home. All your clients, incl. every single smartphone, tablet, laptop, and IoT devices such as smart TVs or light bulb bridges, can use this Pi-hole service as their DNS server. Now here’s the point: it not only caches DNS entries, but blocks certain queries for hostnames that are used for ads, tracking, or even malware. That is: You don’t have to use an ad- or track-blocker on your devices (which is not feasible on smart TVs or smartphone apps, etc.), but you’re blocking these kinds of sites entirely. Nice approach!
Yes, there are already some setup tutorials for the Pi-hole out there. However, it’s not only about installing the mere Pi-hole, but setting it up with your own recursive DNS server (since the default installation forwards to public DNS servers), using DNSSEC, and adding some more adlists. That’s why I am listing my installation procedure here as well. However, it’s not a complete beginners guide. You’ll need some basic Linux know-how.
Some time ago I published a post called DNS Test Names & Resource Records which lists many different FQDNs with lots of different RRs. You can use those public available DNS names to test your DNS servers or the like. However, I was missing a packet capture showing all these resource records as they appear on the wire. So now, here it is. If you are searching for some packets to test your tools for whatever reason, feel free to download this pcap.
If you’re into DNSSEC, you’ll probably have to troubleshoot or at least to verify it. While there are some good online tools such as DNSViz, there is also a command-line tool to test DNSSEC signatures onsite: delv.
It’s not always this simple DNS thing such as “single query – single answer, both via UDP”. Sometimes you have some more options or bigger messages that look and behave differently on the network. For example: IP fragmentation for larger DNS answers that do not fit into a single UDP datagram (hopefully not after the DNS flag day 2020 anymore), or DNS via TCP, or some newer options within the EDNS space such as “EDNS Client Subnet” (ECS) or DNS cookies.
I won’t explain any details about those options, but I am publishing a pcap with that kind of packets along with some Wireshark screenshots. Feel free to dig into it.
Continue reading DNS Capture: UDP, TCP, IP-Fragmentation, EDNS, ECS, Cookie
I was interested in how a recursive DNS server resolves DNS queries in detail. That is, not only the mere AAAA or A record, but also DNSSEC keys and signatures, the authority and additional section when testing with dig , and so on. For this I made two simple DNS queries to my recursive DNS server which resulted in more than 100 DNS packets at all. Wow.
In the following I am publishing a downloadable pcap so that you can analyse it by yourself. Furthermore I am showing some listings and screenshots to get an idea of the DNS resolution process.
Implementing DNSSEC for a couple of years now while playing with many different DNS options such as TTL values, I came around an error message from DNSViz pointing to possible problems when the TTL of a signed resource record is longer than the lifetime of the DNSSEC signature itself. Since I was not fully aware of this (and because I did not run into a real error over the last years) I wanted to test it more precisely.
In my last blogpost I showed how to perform a DNSSEC KSK rollover. I did it quite slowly and carefully. This time I am looking into an emergency rollover of the KSK. That is: What to do if your KSK is compromised and you must replace it IMMEDIATELY.
I am listing the procedures and commands I used to replace the KSK of my delegated subdomain dyn.weberdns.de with BIND. And, as you might already suggested, I am showing DNSViz graphs after every step since it greatly reveals the current DNSKEYs etc.
Probably the most crucial part in a DNSSEC environment is the maintenance of the key-signing key, the KSK. You should rollover this key on a regular basis, though not that often as the zone signing keys, the ZSKs. I am doing a KSK rollover every 2 years.
In the following I will describe the two existing methods for a KSK rollover along with a step-by-step guide how I performed such a rollover for my zone “weberdns.de”. Of course again with many graphics from DNSViz (with “redundant edges”) that easily reveal the keys and signatures at a glance.
If you are already familiar with DNSSEC this is quite easy: How to sign a delegated subdomain zone. For the sake of completeness, I am showing how to generate and use the appropriate DS record in order to preserve the chain of trust for DNSSEC.
Until now I generated all SSHFP resource records on the SSH destination server itself via ssh-keygen -r <name>. This is quite easy when you already have an SSH connection to a standard Linux system. But when connecting to third-party products such as routers, firewalls, whatever appliances, you don’t have this option. Hence I searched and found a way to generate SSHFP resource records remotely. Here we go:
This is actually a bad user experience problem: To generally omit the manual verification of SSH key fingerprints I am using SSHFP. With fully qualified domain names (FQDN) as the hostname for SSH connections such as ssh nb10.weberlab.de this works perfectly. However, admins are lazy and only use the hostname without the domain suffix to connect to their servers since the domain search does the rest: ssh nb10. Not so for SSHFP which fails since the default OpenSSH client does not use canonicalization for its DNS queries. Hence you must explicitly enable canonicalization for OpenSSH.
I am intensely using the SSH Public Key Fingerprint (SSHFP, RFC 4255) in all of my environments. Since my zones are secured via DNSSEC I got rid of any “authenticity of host ‘xyz’ can’t be established” problems. As long as I am using my central jump host with OpenSSH and the “VerifyHostKeyDNS yes” option I can securely login into any of my servers without any warnings. Great!
However, I encountered a couple of daily problems when using SSHFP. One of them was the question whether SSHFP works behind CNAMEs, that is, when connecting to an alias. Short answer: yes. Some more details here: