Just gonna leave this absolute gem from Thomas Ptacek on DNSSEC here: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/
Aged like a milk.
DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
211–220 of 440 posts
Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not made easier by the fact that a lot of cryptography is either very old and arcane or it's one hell of a mess of code that doesn't make sense without reading standards. I had the misfortune of having to dig deep into constructing ASN.1 payloads by hand [1] because that's the only thing Java speaks, and oh holy hell is this A MESS because OF COURSE there's two ways to encode a bunch of bytes (BIT STRING vs OCTE…
X.509 is a deep legacy, but at least at this point it's well tested. > because that's the only thing Java speaks No, it most definitely is not. You can just construct a private key directly in BouncyCastle: https://downloads.bouncycastle.org/java/docs/bcprov-jdk18on-... I'm 100% certain that you also can do that with raw java.security. I did that about 15 years ago with raw RSA/EC keys. You can just directly specify…
I wouldn't recommend touching openssl (the library, command line tools are okay-ish) with anything that breaths life.
Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not made easier by the fact that a lot of cryptography is either very old and arcane or it's one hell of a mess of code that doesn't make sense without reading standards. I had the misfortune of having to dig deep into constructing ASN.1 payloads by hand [1] because that's the only thing Java speaks, and oh holy hell is this A MESS because OF COURSE there's two ways to encode a bunch of bytes (BIT STRING vs OCTE…
X.509 is a deep legacy, but at least at this point it's well tested. > because that's the only thing Java speaks No, it most definitely is not. You can just construct a private key directly in BouncyCastle: https://downloads.bouncycastle.org/java/docs/bcprov-jdk18on-... I'm 100% certain that you also can do that with raw java.security. I did that about 15 years ago with raw RSA/EC keys. You can just directly specify…
> I'm 100% certain that you also can do that with raw java.security.
I tried that, the problem is Meshcore specific - they do their own weird shit with private and public keys [1]. Haven't figured out how to do the private key import either, because in the C source code (or in python re-implementations) Meshcore just calls directly into the raw ed25519 library to do their custom math... it's a mess.
[1] https://jacksbrain.com/2026/01/a-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-meshc...
Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not made easier by the fact that a lot of cryptography is either very old and arcane or it's one hell of a mess of code that doesn't make sense without reading standards. I had the misfortune of having to dig deep into constructing ASN.1 payloads by hand [1] because that's the only thing Java speaks, and oh holy hell is this A MESS because OF COURSE there's two ways to encode a bunch of bytes (BIT STRING vs OCTE…
The trick to asn.1 is to generate both parser and serializer from the spec. Elliptic curve math on the other hand is ... yeah, you need to know the math and also know the tricks to code that implements it. Both of those have steep learning curve, but it's hardly because it's a mess or it's old.
> Both of those have steep learning curve, but it's hardly because it's a mess or it's old.
Bitpacking structures used to be important in the 60s. That time has passed, unless you're dealing with LoRa, NFC or other cases of highly constrained bandwidth there are way better options to serialize and deserialize information. It's time to move on, and the complexity of all the legacy garbage in crypto has been the case of many a security vulnerability in the past.
As for the code, it might be personal preference but I'd love to have at least some comments referring back to a specification or original research paper in the code.
Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
#215[deleted]
Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welp. I think can call it on DNSSEC now.
Hahaha. You wish :-p
It's a pretty hard argument to work around: WebPKI certificates should go in the DNS, and also the largest DNS providers might at any moment decide not to validate DNSSEC anymore to get through an outage.
Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
#217Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not made easier by the fact that a lot of cryptography is either very old and arcane or it's one hell of a mess of code that doesn't make sense without reading standards. I had the misfortune of having to dig deep into constructing ASN.1 payloads by hand [1] because that's the only thing Java speaks, and oh holy hell is this A MESS because OF COURSE there's two ways to encode a bunch of bytes (BIT STRING vs OCTE…
The trick to asn.1 is to generate both parser and serializer from the spec. Elliptic curve math on the other hand is ... yeah, you need to know the math and also know the tricks to code that implements it. Both of those have steep learning curve, but it's hardly because it's a mess or it's old.
The trick to ASN.1 is to serialize/unserialize it backwards.
Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
#219Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trick to asn.1 is to generate both parser and serializer from the spec. Elliptic curve math on the other hand is ... yeah, you need to know the math and also know the tricks to code that implements it. Both of those have steep learning curve, but it's hardly because it's a mess or it's old.
> Both of those have steep learning curve, but it's hardly because it's a mess or it's old. Bitpacking structures used to be important in the 60s. That time has passed , unless you're dealing with LoRa, NFC or other cases of highly constrained bandwidth there are way better options to serialize and deserialize information. It's time to move on, and the complexity of all the legacy garbage in crypto has been the case…
ASN.1 is not used because of just bitpacking. There are other benefits to ASN.1 and it's probably one of the least problematic parts there.
People who have thought they can do better have made things like PGP. It's one of the worst cryptographic solutions out there. You're free to try as well though.