Some DNS Requests Ruled Illegal in North Dakota

jgreco writes "A judge in North Dakota has just ruled that requesting a zone transfer from a public DNS server is criminal activity within the meaning of the North Dakota Computer Crimes Law. A zone transfer is a simple request that a DNS server hand over information in bulk, and a DNS server may be configured to allow or deny such requests. That the owner of a DNS server would configure the server to allow such requests, and then claim such requests were unauthorized, is simply stunning."

consequence of bad computer crime laws

[j0nb0y (107699)]

Most states have computer crime laws that pretty much say this: It is illegal to access a computer that you are not authorized to access.

This basically means that if you don't have written permission to access a computer, you can't access it legally.

So everyone who uses computers breaks the law, and the law is only truly defined by who prosecutors decide to prosecute.

This state of affairs is completely ridiculous, but unless you find a tech savvy Judge, the situation is unlikely to be changed through the courts.

Re:consequence of bad computer crime laws

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

It IS completely ridiculous. I doubt very much that OSDN or SourceForge (or whatever they're called this week) wants to have to give explicit permission to each and every user on Slashdot, but that's what it appears to have come to because judges are techno-illiterates.

If a service is running on a machine connected to the Internet and that service is obviously not secured, then the only thing that can be assumed is that permission to use that service is implicitly granted, especially in absence of notices stating otherwise.

IOW, if you run a Web server on port 80 and require no authentication, then it can be easily assumed that you intend to publish any materials served via the Web server to the public Internet -- you expect people to access it.

Ditto if you run a DNS service that allows zone transfers to all comers -- you expect that DNS zone transfer will occur and no one will need permission from you to do so.

To rule otherwise is nothing but pure stupidity.

Re:consequence of bad computer crime laws

[jvkjvk (102057)]

No, it's not completely ridiculous. We can talk about generalities as long as we want but they are nothing but straw men. This is a specific case, and it appears to be a special case, where the defendant had an injunction against him to prevent him from harassing the company in question.

Essentially, the judge ruled that the injunction did indeed include the DNS servers the company had. Imagine that, he got that one right!

IOW, even if the company was running a web server on port 80 and require no authentication, it can easily be assumed that --- the defendant would still be barred from making requests to that page. No, not people in general one specific individual who was barred from interacting with the company.

To rule otherwise is nothing but pure stupidity.

Re:consequence of bad computer crime laws

[_Spirit (23983)]

I always think it rather silly to state that a judge declared something illegal. Yes I know that he interprets the law. But all the judge does is look at the law and the case. So all the judge has done is show that the law is stupid. The laws that make this illegal were already around. Don't blame the judge, blame the legislators and push to get the law changed!

DNS illegal now? Read again.

[by Anonymous Coward]

Might want to read the actual court ruling instead of the populistic and alarmist comments surrounding it. As I read it, the defendant already had been told by the court to stop bothering the plaintiff, and he then proceeded to ignore that. In and of itself the ruling doesn't outlaw dns requests, altough the judge's grasp of the technology clearly could stand improvement.

Re:DNS illegal now? Read again.

[tgd (2822)]

See this is why we need a (-1 Informative) moderation... because clearly from the tone of the post and the the majority of the replies, rational response is not the goal of this story submission.

Re:DNS illegal now? Read again.

[autocracy (192714)]

TFA really sucks. The linked judgment is much more useful to read. I'm kind of saddened by the judges focus on "zone transfers," but it's clear that the issue is not about zone transfers. The issue is a pattern of malicious activity that the defendant had an injunction placed on him for. He violated that injunction. It was corporate cyber-stalking harassment, really. I'd say that the zone transfer was illegal in context, especially with an outstanding injunction to stay off the company's servers.

Re:DNS illegal now? Read again.

[squiggleslash (241428)]

What's absolutely hilarious about this are the number of replies to this article complaining about "clueless" Judges who "don't understand the issues" and aren't prepared to "read the evidence" right in front of them. Uh-hum. Because all you guys did, right?

Re:Facts from the ruling

[squiggleslash (241428)]

Well, the ruling's more like being told that you can't enter a shop that happens to have a door unlocked at the front after you've repeatedly entered it and been told explicitly to go away because the shop's not open yet.

Turn computer crime laws upside down

[unlametheweak (1102159)]

From TFA:

"The Court rejects the test for "authorization" articulated by defendant's expert, Lawrence Baldwin. To find all access "authorized" which is successful would essentially turn the computer crime laws of this country upside down."

One could only hope.

FUD

[Telephone Sanitizer (989116)]

It's a civil case.

The worst that can be said about it is that it's bad precedent and the judgment was wrong.

The judge did not make DNS requests illegal.

Computer systems vs human systems

[mlwmohawk (801821)]

What I find interesting is that "computer systems" i.e. networks, disk drives, files, etc. ae well understood by us computer folk. What is "obvious" to us has come from a lot of experience and learning. More over, in constructing things like the internet, we develop a lot of "rules" that make sense within this context.

In the non-nerd world, a lot of the rules created by us nerds run afoul of what most people expect. DNS is a perfect example. To us, it is MADE to serve data. If you put data into DNS, you've made it public. To the rest of the world, however, that doesn't make sense. Its the same issue with HTTP. We see putting stuff on a web site as making it public, but non-nerds see things like deep linking a violation of their site because it does not promote the interaction they expect (viewing ads etc.) and have invested in. To them, you are circumventing their revenue model.

I'm not 100% sure we're 100% right. I don't think we are wrong in our views, but I see the gray area between the two.

Best. Ruling. EVER!

[InfinityWpi (175421)]

Why the hell aren't we celebrating this, people? Okay, for DNS, it sucks... but look at it this way...

It doesn't matter if you set up your system to 'automaticly' share the files you just downloaded... people who accessed them did so without authorization. It can't be considered 'sharing' if you didn't authorize people to download them from you... could this ruling be a tool agaisnt the MAFIAA?

Re:Oops

[mulvane (692631)]

Damn YOU!!!!

I try to be a somewhat law abiding citizen. Thanks for my first criminal act of the day I didn't even mean to commit.

Re:Why am I not suprised?

[plover (150551)]

That's not at all true. The judges I've had dealings with have been damn smart people.

What you're forgetting is that in most court cases, the defendant is there for one of two possible reasons: they really weren't responsible, or they were responsible but are now lying about it. And the plaintiff or complainant is there to make sure something "legal" happens in their favor, and they're not above lying to get their desired outcome, either. Usually there's a lot of both. That means the judges are professionally sitting at the mouth of a never ending river of bullshit, and they have to keep control of the situation.

It's not that judges can't or refuse to understand the technology; it's that the cases are about the people, which is where their focus must remain. The computer didn't act of its own accord. It operated under the direction of its owner. The question of "was there malicious intent?" has nothing to do with DNS or any other logic-based technology and everything to do with the two guys standing in the courtroom.

Re:Unbelievable

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

What is more unbelievable is that you'd take an article summary like this as being the gospel. More often than not, it is someone who hasn't really read the whole article, but wants to see his name on the front page of Slashdot. Dispense with a few facts, create some sensationalism, and the crack Slashdot editing team puts it up without fact checking.

Re:Unbelievable

[orclevegam (940336)]

There's actually a good deal of information in there if you read between the lines a little. What I gathered from it and one of the sites linked by it, is that this guy is well known in the anti-spammer circles as a spam investigator that can compile loads of detailed info on spammers. Apparently Sierra (the plaintiff) is notorious for spam and also for suing anti-spam activists. During the course of compiling evidence against Sierra, this guy performed a DNS Zone transfer (most likely to prove that the source of some spam was actually a server hosted by Sierra). Sierra then sued him claiming the zone transfer wasn't authorized by them, and therefore it was illegal (not going to argue if that's logical or not, just summarizing here). Up to this point any technically minded person would probably think the plaintiff was on pretty shaky ground. However, the defendant screwed himself over it seems by annoying the judge various ways. According to the findings, the defendant gave false testimony on several occasions. It may or may not have been false testimony, it's sometimes hard to say when lawyers get involved, but the judge perceived it as such and that's what counts. Much worse it seems, is that the judge ordered the defendant not to perform certain scans of Sierras network, but he then proceeded to ignore those orders. This action seems to be the one that really blew the case for him, as it's apparent the judge was really not happy with him for that one.

Re:Unbelievable

[Intron (870560)]

FINDINGS OF FACT

"In all intended uses of a zone transfer, the secondary server is operated by the same party that operates the primary server. A secondary intended purpose for zone transfers is to permit trouble shooting in which case zone transfers may sometimes be undertaken via the manually conducted host -l command. In those instances, however, the person conducting the diagnosis acts with the authorization of the operator of the system and is usually the network administrator for the system."

Sounds like the judge understood it pretty well to me.

Re:Unbelievable

[Sancho (17056)]

Geeks don't like this ruling, though, because it's not black-and-white. A geek think that if it's open on the Internet, it ought to be legal. If it asks for a password and you break in, it ought not be. Absent other means of gaining authorization, a request on the Internet implies a request for authorization, and a reply with the requested information from the server ought to imply authorization. The burden should be on the server operator to restrict or allow access, because on a pseudo-anonymous Internet, there's no other metric we can use. "Most of the time, the server operator wouldn't want this?"

Re:Unbelievable

[orclevegam (940336)]

In this case, the geek in question performed the DNS queries as part of an ongoing investigation into the spam activities of the ISP in question. This was not a case of someone with malicious intent, or even someone exploring for the sake of exploring, this was a computer professional attempting to track the source of some spam and to compile evidence against the spammer. In this regard he was acting more as a PI (I realize a PI is usually licensed by the state, but it's still close enough) in attempting to investigate something that if not directly a crime, is at least questionable.

If I was investigating you, and I came and knocked on your door saying "My car broke down, can I use your phone to call a tow truck?" and while inside your house used a hidden camera to take pictures, this would also be "not authorized", but in most states it's still perfectly legal, and you couldn't then turn around and try to sue me for trespassing.

The reason the judge ruled against the defendant in this case seems to have had a lot less to do with the merit of the case then it did several instances of the defendant giving false testimony, and in at least one case directly violating an order of the court. Essentially the judge was ticked at the guy, and that biased the case against him.

Re:Unbelievable

[Richard_at_work (517087)]

Why the support on Slashdot for anti-spam laws then? If your smtp server accepts my connection and accepts the mail I subsequently send to you through that connection, how is this any different to the arguments posed elsewhere in this thread about public access services and presumed legality?

Re:Unbelievable

[dekemoose (699264)]

if I make a bad analogy but it makes sense to me, is it still a bad analogy?

Re:Unbelievable

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

In all intended uses of a zone transfer,

Well, there's a problem right there. No one person knows all the intended uses of a zone transfer. I learned a new one today from a sibling post -- actually migrating DNS information to a new host, when switching service providers.

the secondary server is operated by the same party that operates the primary server.

*chokes on breakfast* ...what?

I've been using it for almost a year now, for dynamic DNS. It means I get to configure and run a real DNS server, and set it up exactly the way I like, and then, when I need to update the records on my real DNS servers (at zoneedit.com, dyndns.com, etc), I only have to change one setting -- the master host. This means that, for example, if I want to switch to another system, I don't have to learn a new API (or write one to crawl their website) that's much more complicated than a single POST request, updating which master server they should update from.

(Just been reading that zoneedit.com sucks, so I'm considering switching to dyndns.com, which honestly is pretty cheap, and their service which does zone transfers is cheaper than their service which has a web interface.)

That is to say: I operate the primary server, and the secondary and tertiary servers are operated by a third party, even if these secondary and tertiary servers are listed in my domain as primary and secondary servers. This is hardly unique to dynamic DNS -- it's also used in cases where there is a static IP, but you only want to maintain one server, and you (obviously) can't guarantee five nines of uptime on that server. So you pay someone to run a secondary DNS server.

A secondary intended purpose for zone transfers is to permit trouble shooting in which case zone transfers may sometimes be undertaken via the manually conducted host -l command. In those instances, however, the person conducting the diagnosis acts with the authorization of the operator of the system and is usually the network administrator for the system.

That's reasonable, but answer this: If I were to use the "host" command -- just "host", by itself, looking up MX records and such -- should I be worried about it being illegal? What about "whois" and such? There are plenty of times when it's reasonable to expect that a third party should run diagnostics -- such as when the first party is completely clueless, and needs to be told so. [centos.org]

Some other poster put it very clearly -- geeks generally believe that if you make a service public, it is public. It's certainly possible to limit zone transfers to the IP address of the secondary DNS server. This would not be an absolute protection, but it would at least show what the intent was.

This has been debated fairly often with respect to open wireless access points. What you have here is, according to the machine protocols involved, a machine shouting "Look at me! My name is LINKSYS, and I'm open! Just connect if you want to get online!" It is trivially easy, in most cases, to have it instead broadcast "My name is LINKSYS, and you'll need a password to connect!" Or, alternatively, to not brodcast at all -- to just sit in a corner until someone says, "Hey, LINKSYS! Let me connect!"

It's not quite that bad, but it's similar. "Hey, ns1.example.com! Would you mind telling me what all the subdomains of example.com are?" (There are legitimate reasons for doing this, too -- maybe I'm a spider, and I want to find web pages which aren't specifically linked to by www.example.com.) At this point, if ns1.example.com says "Sure! There's mail.example.com, and www.example.com, and, oh yeah, super.secret.stuff.example.com"... how is this your fault? If super.secret.stuff was really that secret, ns1.example.com could've left it out, or could've said "No, sorry, I'm not going to tell you."

The reason geeks w

Re:Unbelievable

[Pollardito (781263)]

"Sir, a zone transfer is when you type 'dig google.com axfr'. It is a standard feature of the DNS protocol and software suite. The only way it can be abused is if it is left unprotected by the network administrator, much the same as a house can be abused if you leave your doors and windows unlocked."

if you leave your doors and windows unlocked it's still a crime to "abuse" the house, it almost sounds like you're arguing that zone transferring is trespassing

Re:Your example is wrong

[j-pimp (177072)]

Just because the door is unlocked does not mean you have permission to enter.

Well look at it this way. If I walk into a laundromat and there is no attendant on duty I would not consider myself trespassing. No reasonable person would. I've been to laundromats without attendants on duty. I assume someone opens them up ion the morning, locks them up in the evening and periodically comes buy to refill the vending machines and the like.

If I am a reasonable person on the internet, and a server responds to a zone transfer request, I expect that I am authorized to look at this information,