Experts Tell Feds To Sign the DNS Root ASAP 147
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:DNSSEC ready for prime time? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:An explanation please? (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 Windows or other OS, have it online and sign the keys automatically, the manual process takes a back seat. It would be a very time consuming job to handle more than a small zone. Plus the NIST manual is about 120 pages on how to do it to what the NIST standards would require. It not a trivial proposition. Since the keys from the signing box are in the clear, as well, they could be thefted by a crafty thief. Or they could walk out with the thumb drive that they were stored on for the sneaker net transaction.
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.
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).