Domain Name System (DNS) is a major target for the network security attacks due to the weak authentication. A security extension DNSSEC has been proposed to introduce the public-key authentication, but it is still on the deployment phase. DNSSEC assumes IP fragmentation allowance for exchange of its messages over UDP large payloads. IP fragments are often blocked on network packet filters for administrative reasons, and the blockage may prevent fast exchange of DNSSEC messages. In this paper, we propose a scheme to detect the UDP large-payload transfer capability between two DNSSEC hosts. The proposed detection scheme does not require new protocol elements of DNS and DNSSEC, so it is applicable by solely modifying the application software and configuration. The scheme allows faster capability detection to probe the end-to-end communication capability between two DNS hosts by transferring a large UDP DNS message. The DNS software can choose the maximum transmission unit (MTU) on the application level using the probed detection results. Implementation test results show that the proposed scheme shortens the detection and transition time on fragment-blocked transports.

Exploiting vulnerabilities of remote systems is one of the fundamental behaviors of malware that determines their potential hazards. Understanding what kind of propagation tactics each malware uses is essential in incident response because such information directly links with countermeasures such as writing a signature for IDS. Although recently malware sandbox analysis has been studied intensively, little work is done on securely observing the vulnerability exploitation by malware. In this paper, we propose a novel sandbox analysis method for securely observing malware's vulnerability exploitation in a totally isolated environment. In our sandbox, we prepare two victim hosts. We first execute the sample malware on one of these hosts and then let it attack the other host which is running multiple vulnerable services. As a simple realization of the proposed method, we have implemented a sandbox using Nepenthes, a low-interaction honeypot, as the second victim. Because Nepenthes can emulate a variety of vulnerable services, we can efficiently observe the propagation of sample malware. In the experiments, among 382 samples whose scan capabilities are confirmed, 381 samples successfully started exploiting vulnerabilities of the second victim. This indicates the certain level of feasibility of the proposed method.