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Comment by davidu | Hacker News Reader

I will miss him terribly. He was the guy who let me crash in his room at Defcon when I was a minor and was too young to book my own room. This kicked off 20 years of friendship. He was brilliant, zany, ADD x 1000, and always endearing and loving.

In 2008 I was lucky to collaborate on DNS issues with Dan when he discovered a new form of DNS cache poisoning and spent years helping the Internet upgrade and defend against a serious and significant vulnerability. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for this and so much of his other work.

He was a hacker's hacker, and the guy you want in your corner. Very sad to hear this news.

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"I was lucky to collaborate on DNS issues with Dan when he discovered a new form of DNS cache poisoning"

A really good, and really detailed, overview of what Kaminsky found: http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-kaminsky-dns-vuln.htm... Kaminsky references this from the sidebar in his blog.

Wait, they only made this attack 2000 times harder? That was the whole fix?

Additional mitigations started to come in to play after that to make it both impractical, detectable, and improbable. It's just shy of impossible now, and in the very unusual scenarios where it's possible, it's so easily detectable.

Dan's work pushed the adoption of BCP38, segmentation of authoritative and recursive resolvers, and better source port randomization. Entirely new mitigations were developed like 0x20, source address randomization, and double response detection.

I saw him speak at BlackHat in 2008 when he presented that work -- _everyone_ was there. It was an amazing presentation, and I was properly filled with respect for Dan.

So very sad that he's gone so young.

I was there that year, too. And the year before and after. And at ToorCon that year, which was tiny and it was great to talk to him there. Many of my journeys to conferences were because he was on the docket.

A true inspiration in infosec.

Was this talk recorded?

It was. Well, his Defcon version is an identical talk given the same week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pp72gUYx00

Thanks for the link; would you like to submit that as a separate HN submission as well, including [video] in the title? (I think that'd be within the site guidelines[1])

Might post it myself if you'd prefer not to; I figured it might make sense for you to claim the credit/karma.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Feel free.

Someone else got to it before I did; thank you anyway.

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