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Tool Release: Redirecting traffic with dnsRedir.py

05 September 2013

By Aaron Haymore

This research was originally performed by researchers from iSec Partners (now NCC Group), and has been migrated to research.nccgroup.com for posterity.

Redirecting traffic with dnsRedir.py

05 Sep 2013 – Tim Newsham

Often while performing network protocol testing, we want to be able to redirect traffic going to a legitimate server to a server of our own. If the program in question is on the local machine and uses standard name resolution, it’s quite simple to edit the /etc/hosts file. However, this is not always the case. In these situations, it’s convenient to have a DNS server that provides an intentionally incorrect answer to DNS lookups. Setting up a DNS server can be a pain, and then there’s the matter of wanting to allow most queries to complete normally without interference.

DnsRedir is a small tool built to address this need. It implements a small DNS server in Python that can answer a select few queries with intentionally false data while proxying all other queries through to a real DNS server. It is implemented to be small and easy to carry around. It should work fine in Windows, Linux and OS X, and its only depedency is that a recent version of Python 2.* be installed.

Getting the tool

See the Github repository page for documentation and to download the tool.