Security: Patching and New Kinds of Threats

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Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libdatetime-timezone-perl, openldap, pacemaker, and restic), Fedora (libmediainfo, mediainfo, mingw-python3, and seamonkey), Gentoo (libexif), openSUSE (raptor), Oracle (kernel and microcode_ctl), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (kernel-firmware, postgresql, postgresql96, postgresql10 and postgresql12, and raptor), and Ubuntu (openldap and postgresql-10, postgresql-12, postgresql-9.5).
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Be Very Sparing in Allowing Site Notifications
An increasing number of websites are asking visitors to approve “notifications,” browser modifications that periodically display messages on the user’s mobile or desktop device. In many cases these notifications are benign, but several dodgy firms are paying site owners to install their notification scripts and then selling that communications pathway to scammers and online hucksters.
[...]
This is evident by the apparent scale of the infrastructure behind a relatively new company based in Montenegro called PushWelcome, which advertises the ability for site owners to monetize traffic from their visitors. The company’s site currently is ranked by Alexa.com as among the top 2,000 sites in terms of Internet traffic globally.
Website publishers who sign up with PushWelcome are asked to include a small script on their page which prompts visitors to approve notifications. In many cases, the notification approval requests themselves are deceptive — disguised as prompts to click “OK” to view video material, or as “CAPTCHA” requests designed to distinguish automated bot traffic from real visitors.
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Measuring Middlebox Interference with DNS Records
The Domain Name System (DNS) is often referred to as the “phonebook of the Internet.” It is responsible for translating human readable domain names–such as mozilla.org–into IP addresses, which are necessary for nearly all communication on the Internet. At a high level, clients typically resolve a name by sending a query to a recursive resolver, which is responsible for answering queries on behalf of a client. The recursive resolver answers the query by traversing the DNS hierarchy, starting from a root server, a top-level domain server (e.g. for .com), and finally the authoritative server for the domain name. Once the recursive resolver receives the answer for the query, it caches the answer and sends it back to the client.
Unfortunately, DNS was not originally designed with security in mind, leaving users vulnerable to attacks. For example, previous work has shown that recursive resolvers are susceptible to cache poisoning attacks, in which on-path attackers impersonate authoritative nameservers and send incorrect answers for queries to recursive resolvers. These incorrect answers then get cached at the recursive resolver, which may cause clients that later query the same domain names to visit malicious websites. This attack is successful because the DNS protocol typically does not provide any notion of correctness for DNS responses. When a recursive resolver receives an answer for a query, it assumes that the answer is correct.
DNSSEC is able to prevent such attacks by enabling domain name owners to provide cryptographic signatures for their DNS records. It also establishes a chain of trust between servers in the DNS hierarchy, enabling clients to validate that they received the correct answer.
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