Robert Stucke (bobhex)
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2013–2016
37:02 · 20K views · Oct 30, 2013
A DEFCON 21 talk by Robert Stucke on DNS errors caused by single-bit flips, which lead to requests for misspelled domains. It shows real-world data on bitsquatting.
Cited in threads on ECC memory, CPU reliability, and bitsquatting as evidence that bit flips cause real DNS misdirection.
4 comments from Hacker News
It was posted here on HN a few days ago, but you might find the DEFCON talk on single bit domain errors relevant: this video In summary, some data centers are run hotter than recommended, which leads to a lot of mostly ignored domain resolution errors, which leads to a security risk.
>We have registered all possible domains that are one bit flip away from ubuntu.com and debian.org. We would like to hand these domains over to the correct authority. Please get in touch if you think you are one. Aha! [LINK] is a talk about "bitsquatting" along the same lines. I'm sure I've seen a newer talk about it too Edit: this video is the other video, which also looks at the behaviour of various clients
The homoglyph attack is a very old and often abused technique. A related, though not identical one, is bit flipping where a single character is swapped in a domain name and you prey on those who make misspellings. It turns out, however, that it isn't even necessary for someone to make a blatant error like that... this video [DEFCON 21: DNS May Be Hazardous To Your Health]
This cannot possibly be right. There was a DC21 talk regarding DNS request misfires due to bit flips in non-ECC DRAM, and the researcher was able to collect a surprisingly large number of requests on the basis of this. Edit: found it: this video