search menu icon-carat-right cmu-wordmark

CERT Coordination Center

Automatic DNS registration and proxy autodiscovery allow spoofing of network services

Vulnerability Note VU#598349

Original Release Date: 2018-09-05 | Last Revised: 2018-10-23

Overview

Automatic DNS registration and autodiscovery functionality provides an opportunity for the misconfiguration of networks, resulting in a loss of confidentiality and integrity of the network if an attacker on the network adds a specially configured proxy device.

Description

The Web Proxy Automatic Discovery (WPAD) protocol is used to automatically provide proxy configuration information to devices on a network. Clients issue a special DHCP request to obtain the information for the proxy configuration, but will fall back on a DNS request to one of several standardized URLs making use of the subdomain name of “wpad” if a DHCP response is unavailable.

An attacker with local area network (LAN) access may be able to add a device with the name “wpad” to the network, which may produce a collision with a standardized WPAD DNS name. Many customer premise home/office routers (including, but not limited to, Google Wifi and Ubiquiti UniFi) automatically register device names as DNS A records on the LAN, which may allow an attacker to utilize a specially named and configured device to act as a WPAD proxy configuration server. The attacker-served proxy configuration can result in the loss of confidentiality and integrity of any network activity by any device that utilizes WPAD.

Other autodiscovery names such as ISATAP may also be exploitable.

Impact

An attacker, with access to the network, could add a malicious device to the network with the name "WPAD". This attacker may be able to utilize DNS auto-registration and auto-discovery to act as a proxy for victims on the network, resulting in a loss of confidentiality and integrity of network activity.

Solution


Home/office LAN/WLAN routers should not auto-register to their local DNS magic names related to auto-configuration and auto-discovery features should not accept mDNS based names as authoritative sources.

Apply the vendor patch.

Vendor Information

598349
 

View all 226 vendors View less vendors


CVSS Metrics

Group Score Vector
Base 0 AV:--/AC:--/Au:--/C:--/I:--/A:--
Temporal 0 E:ND/RL:ND/RC:ND
Environmental 0 CDP:ND/TD:ND/CR:ND/IR:ND/AR:ND

References

Acknowledgements

This attack was found, tested and reported by Ossi Salmi, Mika Seppänen, Marko Laakso and Kasper Kyllönen of Arctic Security. We asked help of Jussi Eronen and Iikka Sovanto of NCSC-FI in reaching out the vendor representatives.

This document was written by Laurie Tyzenhaus and Garret Wasserman.

Other Information

CVE IDs: CVE-2017-11903, CVE-2017-11810, CVE-2017-11793, CVE-2017-11890, CVE-2017-11907, CVE-2017-11906, CVE-2017-11855
Date Public: 2018-09-05
Date First Published: 2018-09-05
Date Last Updated: 2018-10-23 17:34 UTC
Document Revision: 59

Sponsored by CISA.