XDRI Attacks - and - How to Enhance Resilience of Residential Routers

Abstract

We explore the security of residential routers and find a range of critical vulnerabilities. Our evaluations show that 10 out of 36 popular routers are vulnerable to injections of fake records via misinterpretation of special characters. We also find that in 15 of the 36 routers the mechanisms, that are meant to prevent cache poisoning attacks, can be circumvented. In our Internet-wide study with an advertisement network, we identified and analyzed 976 residential routers used by web clients, out of which more than 95% were found vulnerable to our attacks. Overall, vulnerable routers are prevalent and are distributed among 177 countries and 4830 networks. To understand the core factors causing the vulnerabilities we perform black- and white-box analyses of the routers. We find that many problems can be attributed to incorrect assumptions on the protocols’ behaviour and the Internet, misunderstanding of the standard recommendations, bugs, and simplified DNS software implementations. We provide recommendations to mitigate our attacks. We also set up a tool to enable everyone to evaluate the security of their routers at https://xdi-attack.net/ .