The attacker poisons a DNS cache to take over authority for a given domain. The attacker then creates a phishing page and tries to steal user's usernames/passwords. There are two classes of experiments that need to be combined:

1. an experiment where a DNS cache is poisoned, subclass of cache poisoning experiments
2. an experiment where a phishing attack is conducted via a Web page to steal usernames/passwords

Example 2: DNS cache poisoning for phishing

This example used two metadescriptions. Let's go through each of them:

Cache poisoning metadescription

Dimensions:

• Logical topology:

(in English: There is one attacker node. There is one fake resource, of type Info which means that it is a piece of text that is given to someone upon request. A cache is simply a collection of Info items, one or more. Cache does not reside at the attacker.)

• Timeline of events:

(in English: An attacker sends a reply to the cache (may be solicited or not) with information about resource=fakeresource. This leads to cache accepting the fake information. Notice that nothing is said about WHY cache chooses to accept this - this is specific to the poisoning flavor.)

• Invariants:

Nothing in addition to the topology and timeline above.

DNS Cache poisoning metadescription

This is a special case of cache poisoning where the target is DNS cache. I've highlighted customizations from the general cache poisoning metadescriptions to arrive at this one.

Dimensions:

• Logical topology:

(in English: There is one attacker node. There is either a fakeIP or fake authority that the attacker wants to inject into the cache. The first is of type IPaddress, the second of type DNSname. Both of these types are subtypes of Info, and this is recorded somewhere in the domain knowledge DB. A cache is simply a collection of DNSRecord items, one or more. These are also subtypes of Info and in the domain knowledge DB there's syntax defined for a DNSRecord. Cache does not reside at the attacker.)

• Timeline of events:

(in English: Attacker asks for name.domain - nothing is said if the name is a made up one or real one. Cache then finds the authority for that domain - again nothing is said how. Once found, cache asks the authority for the name.domain and gets a reply. At the same time one of two scenarios can happen. If the name is selected randomly (made-up) then the attacker tries to replace the authority for the domain with some fake authority. Otherwise, he tries to replace the name.domain IP with a fakeIP. In both cases the attacker's reply should arrive before the auth's reply. Note that nothing is said about what a reply has to contain to be accepted as the right reply for the query - which is having a specific queryID. This is protocol dependent and at this model level what's important is that "reply should fit the query". How is the question for lower levels. Also, oftentimes at the lower level guesswork will be needed for the reply to fit the query so there may be looping in the actual experiment - that is all left for the lower level.)

• Invariants:

Nothing in addition to the topology and timeline above.

Confidential input metadescription

The phishing attempt is essentially same as presenting a valid page to the user that asks for confidential info - it's just that the location of that page is not as user expected.

Dimensions:

• Logical topology:

(in English: There is a user and a server node. There are two pieces of information - some confidential information about the user and optionally some public information. The user is a human, which means that his actions should be generated by some process that mimics human behavior.)

• Timeline of events:

(in English: User accesses the server and the server asks the user for some confidential info and possibly some public info. The user then sends those over.)

• Invariants:

Nothing in addition to the topology and timeline above.

Experiment design

Now I'm a user who wants to design an experiment. I need to combine two metadescriptions (DNS cache poisoning and phishing) and somehow tie them down to generator choices. To combine I'll do something like this:

i.e. the fakeIP from DNS cache poisoning metadescription belongs to the server from confidential input metadescription. Notice that I did nothing to say that fakeIP should match the IP address of the server but that's obvious from the context. Since fakeIP is an IP address it must match an IP address that somehow has to be related to the server.

The system now needs to offer me several generators:

• It should offer a topology generator and map the nodes (Auth, Attacker, Server) to the topology that gets generated. Cache has to reside somewhere and it can't be at the attacker or Auth, so it will need an extra node. Note there's a little vagueness here - I said nothing about the server so theoretically cache could go there but it wouldn't make sense since the DNS at the server would know what is this server's IP. So ultimately this would violate some invariant during setup when it would become obvious that the findauth step will never point to Auth since DNS info hard-coded at the Server node has all the right information.
• It should offer event generator for each of the events: query, reply, access, askconfidential. Specifically for query, reply it should offer DNS traffic generators. For access, askconfidential it should offer HTTP traffic generators.