Software Engineering Institute

The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) is a popular Domain Name System (DNS) implementation from Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). Version 8 of the BIND software uses a weak algorithm to generate DNS query identifiers. This condition allows an attacker to reliably guess the next query ID, thereby allowing for DNS cache poisoning attacks.

ISC states that this bug only affects outgoing queries, generated by BIND 8 to answer questions as a resolver, or when it is looking up data for internal uses, such as when sending NOTIFY messages to slave name servers. Note that although this vulnerability is similar in nature and impact to VU#252735, it is a distinct issue.

A remote attacker with the ability to predict DNS query IDs and respond with arbitrary answers, could poison DNS caches.

Upgrade or apply a patch

Users should obtain a patch from their operating system vendor when available. Please see the Systems Affected section of this document for more information about specific vendors.

Users who compile their own versions of BIND 8 from the original ISC source code are encouraged to take the following actions described by ISC:

This issue is addressed in ISC BIND 8.4.7-P1, available as patch that  
can be applied to BIND 8.4.7.
The more definitive solution is to upgrade to BIND 9. BIND 8 is being  
declared "end of life" by ISC due to multiple architectural issues.  
See ISC's website at http://www.isc.org for more information and  
assistance.