[dns-operations] fyi: nook dns

[David Dagon]

There's an interesting DNS hack for the nook; this note offers some
thoughts on that topic.

The 'nook' is an ebook reader by Barnes and Noble---essentially a
touch screen tablet that displays licensed content obtained over wifi
or an embedded 3G card (AT&T).

Some developers are working on rooting the nook, but even without
rooting, they appear to have a working DNS hack to push arbitrary user
content:

   http://nookdevs.com/DNS_Hack#The_Technical_Details

In short, one changes the resolver to 69.164.195.211, a dnsmasq host
that returns a poisoned record for barnesandnoble.com.  (All other
queries are forwarded to OpenDNS).  This allows non-BN content to be
hosted (currently only at 69.164.195.211), so users can download other
non-BN content.  It is not known if this is merely a hobby, or
someone's nascent business model for e-publishing.  It's clearly
opt-in; perhaps if the nook user base becomes large enough, then
non-consensual DNS changes will be tried.

Does anyone with an AT&T 3G connection know about their rfc 3481
network MTU, ability to support EDNS0?  While I would fully support
hobbyist's ability to tinker, and the ability of individuals to load
non-BN materials as they wish, I expect action from BN---most likely
using lawyers.  But using DNSSEC or DLV would make for an interesting
solution, and a real-world DNSSEC deployment story.  Since the nook
also uses wifi (most likely via CPE), secure DNS might only provide a
partial solution.

In any event, I found this all very interesting.  The genie is out of
the bottle, and we can expect more DNS editing for fun and profit.

-- 
David Dagon              /"\                          "When cryptography
dagon at cc.gatech.edu      \ /  ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN    is outlawed, bayl
Ph.D. Candidate           X     AGAINST HTML MAIL      bhgynjf jvyy unir
Georgia Inst. of Tech.   / \                           cevinpl."