Downgrading DNSSEC: How to Exploit Crypto Agility for Hijacking Signed Zones

Cryptographic algorithm agility is an important property for DNSSEC: it allows easy deployment of new algorithms if the existing ones are no longer secure. Significant operational and research efforts are dedicated to pushing the deployment of new algorithms in DNSSEC forward. Recent research shows that DNSSEC is gradually achieving algorithm agility: most DNSSEC supporting resolvers can validate a number of different algorithms and domains are increasingly signed with cryptographically strong ciphers.

In this work we show for the first time that the cryptographic agility in DNSSEC, although critical for making DNS secure with strong cryptography, also introduces a severe vulnerability. We find that under certain conditions, when new, unsupported algorithms are listed in signed DNS responses, the resolvers do not validate DNSSEC. As a result, domains that deploy new ciphers, risk exposing the validating resolvers to cache poisoning attacks. We use this to develop DNSSEC-downgrade attacks and experimentally and ethically evaluate our attacks against popular DNS resolver implementations, public DNS providers, and DNS resolvers used by web clients.

We validate the success of DNSSEC-downgrade attacks by poisoning the resolvers: we inject fake records, in signed domains, into the caches of validating resolvers. Our evaluations showed that during 2021 major DNS providers, such as Google Public DNS and Cloudflare, as well as 35% of DNS resolvers used by the web clients were vulnerable to our attacks. After coordinated disclosure with the affected operators, that number reduced to 5.03% in 2022.

We trace the factors that led to this situation and provide recommendations.