Cisco is one of 40 vendors that use DNSmasq in their products. Not all will be vulnerable to the suite of attacks, depending on their configuration. (Cisco)

Researchers at JSOF have discovered seven distinct spoofing and buffer overflow vulnerabilities associated with DNSMasq, a popular free, open-source piece of software used in networking devices to cache and forward Domain Name System requests.

The DNS is often referred to as the “phonebook” of the internet and is used to match URLs (such as www.scmagazine.com) with their corresponding IP address. In a paper released Jan. 19, researchers from JSOF outline three DNS cache poisoning vulnerabilities and another four buffer overflow vulnerabilities they are collectively calling DNSpooq. Used individually or in tandem, the vulnerabilities allow a malicious actor to carry out a number of diverse attacks, such as spoofing popular websites, conducting denial of service attacks and in some cases performing remote code execution.

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