Re: Dishonest Forks? | Was - Re: [Namedroppers-honest] Brian Smith asks: Who is Dean Anderson?

The fork offered by "Mark Johnson" via sourceforge, called zinq

Emails and other efforts at identifying "Mark Johnson"  
[email protected], only lead to an email address, and no emails before
a couple years ago. No other "Mark Johnson" participated in qmail,
djbdns or any other DNS or email list that I could find.  "Mark Johnson" 
appears to be a sockpuppet, possibly operated by one or all of Dempsky, 
Day, Kaminsky or their associates. 

The fork contains changes originated by Kevin Day and Dan Kaminsky, 
which change the way that DJBDNS handles random ports. The initial 
proposal sent to me by Day seriously weakened DJBDNS to birthday attacks 
and cache poisoning. The changes distributed by "Mark Johnson" are a 
variant of these changes.

Dan Kaminsky is known to be a hacker who reported identifying 500,000
open DNS recursors to a black-hat convention called Schmoo-con in
October 2005. The first attacks using DNS recursors were reported in
Februrary, 2006.  These recursors were not open, but "half open", that
is, open to internal address but not open from external addresses.  To
identify open recursors would require scanning, and Kaminsky announced
no scanning before October 2005. By contrast, groups like CAIDA that
regularly scan DNS servers, regularly get complaints about the scanning
despite announcements. No complaints of scanning were reported. So I
think that the scanning was done piecemeal from a botnet, rather than
from a fixed IP.  Positing 'discovery by botnet' also explains why
half-open recursors were apparently discovered: because they are open to
the bots on their internal network.

In 2009, Kaminsky was involved in a scam to get people to switch to
OpenDNS by claiming to have discovered a flaw in DNS. In fact, the flaw
was discovered years earlier, and even the specific scheme of spoofing
NS records was tested and discussed in 2006. Kaminsky's claim was
debunked by (amoung others) MIT Technology Review.

Dempsky is a supporter of the zinq changes and thinks that sock-puppet
software distribution is OK. It turns out that Dempsky works for
OpenDNS.  Other friends of Kaminsky have been linked to uber-spammer
Scott Richter.  I haven't announced the results of the QuickPoll, yet,
but they are unfavorable to Dempsky/Johnson's position.

Short enough?

		--Dean

On Tue, 9 Mar 2010, Chris Pugh wrote:

> On 8 March 2010 20:51, Dean Anderson <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Similarly, we have a moral duty to make people aware of discredited
> > forks of DJBDNS.
> 
> For those of us ( probably only myself ) whom are in the the dark on
> this pont, but wish to be enlightened, bearing in mind that Mr
> Bernstein has placed his DNS software in the Public Domain, perhaps
> you would care to state, in your oipinion, which 'forks' of DJBDNS are
> discredited, which dishonest, which not, and why?
> 
> A concise 'potted; response would be great ( so as I don't get lost in
> a forest of words )
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> Chris
> 
> Aside
> ====
> 
> I am pleased to note that the Good Shepherd is ever watchful of his
> flock,  I am particularly taken with,
> 
>           http://cr.yp.to/hardware/build-20060107.html
> 
> where Dr B  states,
> 
> 'Turning on the computer. Starting now, be very careful not to touch
> anything inside the case. Power will be flowing into the computer in a
> moment; if you touch something inside the case, you can electrocute
> yourself!'
> 
> Cheers Dan! ;o)
>   ;o)
> 
> 

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