Assessing and Exploiting Domain Name Misinformation

Cloud providers' support for network evasion techniques that misrepresent the server's domain name is more prevalent than previously believed, which has serious implications for security and privacy due to the reliance on domain names in common security architectures. Domain fronting is one such evasive technique used by privacy enhancing technologies and malware to hide the domains they visit, and it uses shared hosting and HTTPS to present a benign domain to observers while signaling the target domain in the encrypted HTTP request. In this paper, we construct an ontology of domain name misinformation and detail a novel measurement methodology to identify support among cloud infrastructure providers. Despite several of the largest cloud providers having publicly stated that they no longer support domain fronting, our findings demonstrate a more complex environment with many exceptions. We also present a novel and straightforward attack that allows an adversary to man-in-the-middle all the victim's encrypted traffic bound to a content delivery network that supports domain fronting, breaking the authenticity, confidentiality, and integrity guarantees expected by the victim when using HTTPS. By using dynamic linker hijacking to rewrite the HTTP Host field, our attack does not generate any artifacts that are visible to the victim or passive network monitoring solutions, and the attacker does not need a separate channel to exfiltrate data or perform command-and-control, which can be achieved by rewriting HTTP headers.
Comment: Presented at the 8th International Workshop on Traffic Measurements for Cybersecurity (WTMC 2023)