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Experts Tell Feds To Sign the DNS Root ASAP
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Nov 25, 2008 02:08 PM
from the digital-john-hancock dept.
from the digital-john-hancock dept.
alphadogg sends along news that the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration has gotten plenty of feedback on its call for comments on securing the root zone using DNSSEC. The comment period closed yesterday, and more than 30 network and security experts urged the NTIA to implement DNSSEC stat. There were a couple of dissenting voices and a couple of trolls.
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DNSSEC Advances in gTLDs; Bernstein Intros DNSCurve 179 comments
coondoggie writes "Seven leading domain name vendors — representing more than 112 million domain names, or 65% of all registered names — have formed an industry coalition to work together to adopt DNSSEC. Members of the DNSSEC Industry Coalition include: VeriSign, which operates the .com and .net registries; NeuStar, which operates the .biz and .us registries; .info operator Afilias Limited; .edu operator EDUCAUSE; and The Public Interest Registry, which operates .org." The gTLD operators are falling in line behind government initiatives, which we discussed last month. In light of these developments, Dan Bernstein's push for DNSCurve might face an uphill slog. Reader data2 writes: "Dan Bernstein, the creator of djbdns and daemontools, has created his own proposal to improve upon the current DNS protocol. He has been opposed to DNSSEC for quite some time, and now he has proposed a concrete alternative, DNSCurve. He has posted a comparison between the two systems. His proposal makes use of elliptic curves, while DNSSEC favors RSA. He uses a curve named Curve25519, which he also developed."
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Feds are going to listen and ACT upon this? (Score:5, Funny)
(Satan unpacking his sno-cone machine)
"'Bout damn time I got to use this thing..."
DNSSEC ready for prime time? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is DNSSEC ready for prime time?
Last I checked (admittedly more than a year ago), they were still working on a good way of refreshing the key; there were also other problems with DNSSEC that made it not quite ready for prime time.
Does anyone know if the people involved have all said "Yep, it's done now, go use it"?
It'd suck to be in the IPv4 situation: there's this thing we want to migrate to as soon as everyone else does as well.
It's easy to say "let's try out some shit and drop it if it doesn't work" when very few people grow dependent on your work; when the whole world does so, it's a bit more difficult.
Re:DNSSEC ready for prime time? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:DNSSEC ready for prime time? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's easy to say "let's try out some shit and drop it if it doesn't work" when very few people grow dependent on your work; when the whole world does so, it's a bit more difficult.
In fact, that was what got us into this mess in the first place. We can't replace any part of the internet without breaking everything, so we just keep tacking on new standards and quick-fix patches. Someone needs to redesign the whole thing with an generalized, expandable security model. But then we would have two internets...
"I think the problem here may be more of a question of getting rid of the bad internets and keeping the good internets."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
NSEC3 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5155) solves most of initial DNSSEC problems. But it's not yet supported by production versions of major DNS servers.
Re:DNSSEC ready for prime time? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Is DNSSEC ready for prime time?"
Nope.
I note with relish Vint Cerf and Joe Baptista, who couldm't be more apart on DNS agree that something othre than DNSSEC shuld be used. This is probably the only thing they agree on. And they're quite right.
Why bother? For a CHEAP PKI... (Score:5, Interesting)
With a conventional PKI for your SSL certificates, Verisign or the other CA gets a cut for EVERY server.
With DNSSEC, the "CA" only gets a cut per domain. Thus DNSSEC can be used to offer key distribution with far less cost, once the root and the TLDs start signing records.
(Not an original argument, but I agree with it.)
Re:Why bother? For a CHEAP PKI... (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulation! You've just explained why the DNSSEC will never be implemented on the root server.
Parent
Probably means you pay more actually. (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll still need CAs.
How does DNSSEC stop the browser from giving Joe User a warning box that the https cert is not signed by a recognized CA?
That's the only real reason why you pay CAs to sign your certs - to stop Joe User from being bothered it.
That CA signing bullshit is little to do with security. Because the last I checked:
1) nobody really goes through all the CAs bundled with their browser and says: "Yes I trust this CA, no I don't so I'll delete this". There are tons, do you know who they are and how trustworthy they really are? Do you really care? No all you care is that you don't get that warning.
2) Verisign has proven that they voluntarily do dubious stuff and they've even misissued Microsoft certs (go look under Untrusted Publishers in IE's list of certs
3) Do browser makers actually remove CAs who don't comply to some standard? Do they even have some meaningful standard in terms of security?
4) AFAIK browsers don't warn you if the a valid cert changes to a different valid cert (even if it is signed by a different CA).
As you can see, they're not really safer than self-signed certs. To me browsers should do that SSH thing and warn you if the cert has changed (whether it's self-signed or CA signed).
In that light, forgive me if I'm not convinced that DNSSEC is really going to make things more secure
It'll just be more of the same. One more way for Verisign and gang to make money for making people feel safe.
Parent
Re:Probably means you pay more actually. (Score:5, Informative)
You'll still need CAs.
How does DNSSEC stop the browser from giving Joe User a warning box that the https cert is not signed by a recognized CA?
That's the only real reason why you pay CAs to sign your certs - to stop Joe User from being bothered it.
You don't need the CAs, once applications are rewritten to grab keys from the DNS instead.
Using DNS as a PKI means that my DNS provider is now my CA. If I grab jonaskoelker.free-dns.com and I start out with only a trusted root key, I can learn free-dns's key and trust them. I can then securely send them my key, which they sign for free, along with my signed records.
Then, when you go to jonas.free-dns.com with a modified firefox, that firefox will trust the DNS key for jonas.free-dns.com as an SSL key for jonas.free-dns.com as well, and you'll trust that the guy whose server you're talking to is the same guy as the one who got the name in the first place.
With a changed Firefox, you won't need a CA.
Now, changing how "we" (meaning our browsers) decide whether to trust a site may not be easy, but it can be done.
If your DNS parent is com, all I can say is "Meet your new CA, same as the old CA" ;)
Parent
DNS (Score:5, Funny)
Are you troubled by DNS cache poisoning...well don't worry!
I wrote a song about it!
Your domain will be safe,
You'll be well on your way
With DNS-SEC security!
Signing is a breeze,
Bring hackers to their knees
With DNS-SEC security!
I know you're grown attached to old
Ways of doing things
But when you update BIND
Your heart will race to sing!
DNS-SEC implementation
Put the spammers on permanent vacation
DNS-SEC implementation
I hear it's got great documentation!
Bind me, baby!
(GUITAR SOLO)
Re:DNS (Score:5, Funny)
You don't have a job do you?
Parent
Re:DNS (Score:5, Funny)
Your domain will be safe,
You'll be well on your way
With DNS-SEC security!
For some reason I heard Cartman's voice. Securi-tay
Parent
Nice way to end the song... (Score:5, Funny)
Bind me, baby!
The S in S&M does not stand for Security.
Parent
Re:DNS (Score:5, Funny)
I have written a song for you too:
Your musical ability
Is sure to wisk you merrily
From this shallow pool of genes
For with music like that my friend,
you'll never get laid,
You'll never get laid.
(Git-ar solo)
Parent
not so fast (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/DNS/comments/comment034.pdf [doc.gov]
seemed well thought out, and at the end suggests several other workarounds with fewer issues. Namely, switch to using TCP instead of UDP so there's a handshake involved instead of blindly accepting incoming datagrams. It's not that the bug shouldn't be addressed, but maybe DNSSEC is the wrong answer.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the comment is wrong. The Kaminsky bug is not cache poisoning by fraudulent UDP packets (which is a concern), it is using glue records to provide false NS address. Example:
You visit a website which pulls an image from subdomain.malicious.example.com. To get that, you need to know its nameserver. So you ask malicious.example.com who tells you that the nameserver is ns.citibank.com and oh, BTW that address is 666.666.666 (glue record). Now your cache has a phony address for ns.citibank.com
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That was the Kashpureff attack, not the Kaminsky attack. Your understanding of DNS cache poisoning attacks is unfortunately about a decade out of date. All major resolver implementation now do "bailiwick checking" and aren't fooled by crude, cheap tricks as you describe.
The Kaminsky attack does use forged packets, which then poison the cache with bogus NS records in ways that are not blocked by bailiwick-checking. These bogus NS records then "redirect" future queries of names under the same delegation point
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Centralized DNS really the answer? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Yeah, lets do that.
I for one welcome our soon-to-be DNS bombing, v1agr@ providing overlords.
An explanation please? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:An explanation please? (Score:5, Informative)
It's about the DNS poisoning attacks from a few months ago. DNS Sec works properly when the top servers can vouch for the next server down the tree, but this only works if the top servers are secured with a well known public key.
The issue is that the Federal bureau in charge of the root servers felt it had to go through the same bureaucratic process of getting consent, comments and so on and so forth that all federal regulations have to go through, by law. This takes a while, and a lot of people think they should have just done it.
John Roth
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that DNSSEC is a manually intensive proposition. Keys have to be rolled daily and those keys have to be generated on a machine that is not connected to a network, i.e. sneaker net. The problem stems from current OS implementations that allow you to have access to all the memory. If I could compromise your signing keys, I could sign your zone with my keys and probably get away with further damage as people would inherently trust DNS. The issue is automation. Since you cannot, on Linux or
Why would the establishment prefer DNSSEC (Score:5, Insightful)
...over ubiquitous use of SSL?
Almost all of the extra overhead for crypto and/or signing is in processing the initial public key. So DNSSEC seems to make our systems work about as hard, without the benefit of encrypted data.
OTOH, having an Internet trend set in with most servers switching to SSL (i.e. HTTPS, etc) keeps the government (and corps providing its "security" snooping services) from profiling people based on their everyday choices of art, books, and ways of socializing. It takes ISPs out of the loop as far as acting as surrogate cops snooping on peoples' data.
If I wanted to further a police surveillance state, I would try to set a trend with DNSSEC instead of a different public key scheme that provides encryption along with verification for the same price... especially if the tools to implement the latter were already on everyone's system waiting to be fully used.
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With secure DNS, key distribution for e.g. IPSEC or TLS becomes easier.
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With secure DNS, key distribution for e.g. IPSEC or TLS becomes easier.
Whereas with existing schemes like HTTPS, the client simply caches the acquired symmetric keys as needed. And non-browser applications could poll the default browser on a system in order to use its CA-based verification; that would allow such apps to distribute their own keys safely. (That is, if you're programming in a framework that doesn't already have PKI functionality.)
I don't believe that whatever ease is gained in key distribution outweighs the technical problems and risk of abuse that DNSSEC carries
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Because changing DNS to TCP globally would cause a lot of networks to grind to a halt. I believe DNSSEC allows you to keep things UDP and fast.
I don't mean DNS over TCP. I'm talking about protocols like HTTPS making attacks on regular DNS futile.
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It doesn't make those attacks futile. You can detect them, sure, but if you're getting bogus information from your DNS server, that's still a denial of service (because you can't get the real address of the site).
Plus all that an adversary would need to do is watch the DNS requests as they come in to find out where people are going.
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OTOH, having an Internet trend set in with most servers switching to SSL (i.e. HTTPS, etc) keeps the government (and corps providing its "security" snooping services) from profiling people based on their everyday choices of art, books, and ways of socializing. It takes ISPs out of the loop as far as acting as surrogate cops snooping on peoples' data.
If only you can mod higher than +5...
Everything on the Internet SHOULD be encrypted. I really really wish that I could encrypt every piece of data I send and receive regardless of its content. The only current solutions for constant encryption are things like TOR which uses proxies and there's still a point for failure (the proxy itself to the destination), and can be LAGGY as hell...
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Because SSL and DNSSEC solve two different problems. Unless you're doing DNS-over-SSL, which means running DNS in TCP mode.
Re:Why would the establishment prefer DNSSEC (Score:4, Interesting)
Because SSL and DNSSEC solve two different problems. Unless you're doing DNS-over-SSL, which means running DNS in TCP mode.
I don't think so. A primary motivation for PKI-backed SSL was to protect against any misdirection, whether at the domain-name or IP address level.
DNS over TCP isn't being suggested here. Normal DNS with a PKI-using protocol like HTTPS is what provides the protection I'm talking about. Its the scheme you and I already use whenever we make a purchase or do online banking.
In the case of HTTPS, a interfering with either DNS resolution or misrouting an IP address will cause the connection to stop with a warning. In the case of DNSSEC, interference will generate an error message that most server and client software does not understand.
With SSL/HTTPS/etc. the address is verified outside the DNS protocol. But it is still verified. Moving that verification into DNS doesn't really help unless you prefer to see most internet traffic remain unencrypted.
Parent
Why only one CA? (And it's the feds?!) (Score:5, Interesting)
I love beating this dead horse: OpenPGP is the one scheme that authentication right, and DNS is Yet Another great example where OpenPGP should be used instead of the obsolete X.509.
Why would I trust the feds as an introducer? We already know that they do attempt MitMs sometimes, and there's already a history of DNS abuses ordered by presumably well-intentioned courts. But even if this organization had a good reputation, it's just plain dumb to put all your eggs in one basket. There should be provisions multiple certifiers of an identity, so that users decide who is trustworthy and who isn't.
If the feds are going to sign, I hope they use an OpenPGP [ietf.org] signature (which apparently the spec allows!), but I somehow doubt they would want to lend any legitimacy to a scheme that actually lets people authenticate identities, instead of the one intended to create monopolies and single points of failure.
I have no problem with the feds helping out on this, but we shouldn't completely trust them, and we have the technology so that we don't have to. PRZ gave it to us a couple decades ago.
Re:Why only one CA? (And it's the feds?!) (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a case where you're right, everyone who has thought about it agrees that you're right, and that's still not the design decision that's going to be made.
The issue here is a disagreement on goals. You want to make it so that someone who goes to the necessary effort can be secure against an arbitrary attacker. Others want to make it so that someone who goes to no effort will be secure from one step technical attacks by poorly funded attackers. People who are interested in the second case, which includes all major application developers including Mozilla, dismiss the proof of your point ("what about malicious CAs") as being out of scope.
The only solution to this problem that I can see is to try to provide real security and decentralized infrastructure in as many cases as possible. Why don't we have a Mozilla plugin that uses OpenPGP for SSL with a revolutionary UI that makes it practically useful? Why don't we have distributed DNS? Once we have proof of concept and working code, it'll be much easier to argue that we should be doing these things correctly.
Parent
why only one CA (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, I think any device looking up any DNS record can chose to ignore the signatures if it wants to anyway (most will).
So I fail to see what all the conspiracy issues are surrounding the signature of the root name servers. It seems a far cry from implementing a system to roll dnssec out to every nameserver and if a better solution comes along later, or DNSSEC gets better, the new ideas can probably get bolted on.
Re:Trolls equal... (Score:4, Funny)
In my experience, the trolls are usually right.
"You know, that 13-year-old kid DOES have a point. We should all stretch our anuses and put various large fruits inside our rectal cavities. And what those two ladies are doing with that cup is sheer genius. And I'm certain we can't agree more with his opinion of 'FUCK FUCK FUCK U CUNTS SHIT FUCK DAMN PISS COCK FUCK'. Gentlemen, as usual, we find that the trolls are, indeed, right! To the anus-stretching machines!"
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This troll is right.
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Re:Trolls equal... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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No, he's been moderated as expected. There's no implication that it was "right", correct, or just.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
TouchSlashcodefucksupUnicode.
Re:Trolls equal... (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that trolling is taking an uncommon opinion just for the fun of it, to spark debate, to troll for comments, and to just piss people off.
The claim that the trolls are usually right is wrong, they're actually not interested in the factual matters, they're only interested in controversy. ...wait, did I just get trolled? Crap.
Parent
Re:Trolls equal... (Score:5, Insightful)
Omit your second reason and I'll give you your definition. Taking an unusual viewpoint to spark debate is highly useful.
I used to have a roommate who was doing a degree in social work. She came home one day gushing about the great debate they'd had. Everyone agreed! That's not a debate. That's a love-in badly in need of a skeptic (otherwise known as a shit-disturber).
Parent
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Luckly, others agree and have modded you appropriately...
Oh, wait...
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Re:Gotten? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent