Miracle · July 8 2008

The Miracle of Kaminsky's Patch

The wonder

In early 2008 Dan Kaminsky found a flaw at the heart of DNS that made it possible to poison the cache of almost every resolver in the world and hijack whole domains. Instead of publishing it for glory, he kept it secret and worked with CERT/CC and vendors, including Microsoft, ISC and Cisco, on a common fix based on source-port randomisation. On 8 July 2008 the patches shipped all at once: it was one of the largest coordinated disclosures in Internet history.

The miracle worker

Dan Kaminsky (1979–2021), a security researcher also remembered for how generously he shared what he knew, together with CERT/CC and the many vendors who agreed to fix it quietly and on the same day.

Thanksgiving

Thank you, Dan, for choosing the patch over the spotlight, and for teaching us that a well-kept secret can save the whole Internet. Amen.