Kerberos was slow when talking to my demo machine. As part of debugging it, I was making DNS changes, so I pointed my machine directly to the DNS server. It was at my hosting provider, and authoritative for my domain.

As I tend to do, I idly checked Facebook. Its a bad habit, like biting nails. Sometimes I’m not even aware that I am doing it. This time, however, a browser warning brought me up short:

“Security Error: Domain Name Mismatch”

The certificate reported that it was valid for a domain that ended in the same domain name as the nameserver I was pointing at.

Someone just like me had the ability to push up whatever they wanted to the DNS server. This is usually fine: only the Authoritative DNS server for a site is allowed to replicate changes. It did mean, however, that anyone that was looking at this particular DNS server would be directed to something they were hosting themselves. I’m guessing it was a Phishing attempt as I did not actually go to their site to check.

Most of us run laptops set up to DNS from the DHCP server we connect to. Which means that if we are at a Coffee Shop, the local library, or the Gym, we are running against an unknown DNS server. The less trusted the location, the less reason to trust the DHCP server.

This is a nasty problem to work around. There are things you can do to mitigate, such as whitelisting DNS servers. The onus, however, should not be up to the end users. DNSSec attempts to address the issues. Until we have that, however, use HTTPS where ever possible. And check the certificates.