Economic impact of no-dns-resolutio.nz?
DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
61–70 of 181 posts
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
DNSSEC scares me. CAs are not perferct but they at least have some measure of accountability. Therr are many stories of CAs being removed from browsers, and many of them ended up ceasing operations whatsoever. The reason for that is CAs are interchangeable, if one goes back I can switch to other with almost no distruption. Compare to DNSSEC which are designed to have single supplier. If a TLD registrar goes bad, what…
The TLD registrar has enormous impact on you regardless of DNSSEC, and people just seem to put up with it, much as they put up with having an awful US state government, or a terrible HOA, or dozens of other problems. For ccTLDs you could hope, especially if you are a citizen of the country encoded and it's a democracy, that you can vote for governments who require the TLD registrar to meet your needs. Will that work?…
The important stuff is not just websites I host, but also websites I visit. And in all the scenarios you mention, I (and everyone else) would know that it happened very clearly, as it is basically denial of service attack. Even if this is a takeover event with almost-instantaneous replacement with the phishing page, the website owner would detect this and if the website is at least a bit popular, the news would definitely hit the HN top page :)
For an example, sr.ht is hosted by Haitian TLD but has Let's Encrypt CA. Thanks to CT logs, I trust that the connections are secure, and when I download software from it I am getting it from the rightful place. (Or not getting this at all because website is down. That's a nature of the web, things break)
But with DNSSEC? No assurances at all. Owner of .ha can be coerced or bribed by $(your least favorite nation) and this may never be detected, especially if this is a targeted attack to specific addresses. And even if detected, there will _still_ be people saying, "hopefully this does not affect me, I won't move domains and risk my search traffic".
And that's the reason that DNSSEC scares me and WebPKI does not.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#63I hope the situation gets resolved swiftly, and lessons learned from this incident can contribute to stronger and more reliable DNSSEC practices in the future.
Yep: "don't deploy DNSSEC, rely on TLS"
TLS security is rooted in DNS. It's ACME DNS-01. If your threat model includes nation states, this is a non-solution
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#64It seems like some folks are missing the motivation for DNSSec and suggesting TLS instead. If your threat model includes global adversaries, you have can't rely on TLS because governments can trivially compromise TLS providers and TLS exposes users to the lowest common denominator TLS. The lowest common denominator TLS (ACME DNS-1) and the mitigation to the TLS provider problem (CAA records) are both based on DNS.
So you either accept that TLS is the global maxima for security and world governments can basically permanently compromise the internet, or you build private PKI systems, or you want something like DNSSec. And DNSSec is something like DNSSec.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#65It seems like some folks are missing the motivation for DNSSec and suggesting TLS instead. If your threat model includes global adversaries, you have can't rely on TLS because governments can trivially compromise TLS providers and TLS exposes users to the lowest common denominator TLS. The lowest common denominator TLS (ACME DNS-1) and the mitigation to the TLS provider problem (CAA records) are both based on DNS. So…
Let's say the US wanted to perform an attack that DNSSEC would have prevented, what does that attack look like?
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#66It seems like some folks are missing the motivation for DNSSec and suggesting TLS instead. If your threat model includes global adversaries, you have can't rely on TLS because governments can trivially compromise TLS providers and TLS exposes users to the lowest common denominator TLS. The lowest common denominator TLS (ACME DNS-1) and the mitigation to the TLS provider problem (CAA records) are both based on DNS. So…
Let's say the US wanted to perform an attack that DNSSEC would have prevented, what does that attack look like?
The US seizes the cryptographic material for a US based root, issues keys and certificates for the domains it wants to compromise and intercepts and modifies the traffic for targeted users. There's some additional asterisks around not getting caught and certificate transparency logs and browser reporting structure, but for many classes of devices, it will suffice to simply also hijack the domains used for requesting the transparency log or the domains used for reporting certificates that don't appear in the log.
Users who are concerned about a government like the United States can use DNSSec to prevent a threat like this by using a non-US based TLD that employs DNSSec, and by running their client in a mode that requires valid DNSSec records for their domains. Of course, such services would practically need to be located outside of the country of concern as well.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say the US wanted to perform an attack that DNSSEC would have prevented, what does that attack look like?
The US seizes the cryptographic material for a US based root, issues keys and certificates for the domains it wants to compromise and intercepts and modifies the traffic for targeted users. There's some additional asterisks around not getting caught and certificate transparency logs and browser reporting structure, but for many classes of devices, it will suffice to simply also hijack the domains used for requesting…
For a state like the US, with it's laws and history on surveillance. I assume PKI has been compromised.
I don't check or audit my CA's and don't think most people do either. Wouldn't be surprised if more than one of these has been compromised in some fashion already. It only takes one and there's plenty to target.
The next thing you'd need is a mitm attack and again that's entirely possible for a nation state to pull off at scale.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US seizes the cryptographic material for a US based root, issues keys and certificates for the domains it wants to compromise and intercepts and modifies the traffic for targeted users. There's some additional asterisks around not getting caught and certificate transparency logs and browser reporting structure, but for many classes of devices, it will suffice to simply also hijack the domains used for requesting…
For a state like the US, with it's laws and history on surveillance. I assume PKI has been compromised. I don't check or audit my CA's and don't think most people do either. Wouldn't be surprised if more than one of these has been compromised in some fashion already. It only takes one and there's plenty to target. The next thing you'd need is a mitm attack and again that's entirely possible for a nation state to pull…
Every single certificate issued by a WebPKI CA (ie: a CA whose certificates are accepted by Google or Mozilla's root programs) is logged in a globally auditable tamper-proof log. You can stand up an instance of that log, or monitor any of the existing logs yourself. You're not relying on laws to surveil the WebPKI CAs, but rather mathematics.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#69If a safety upgrade to driving a car made people crash their cars more, you'd call that a bug. For DNS it's a feature called DNSSEC.
Maybe the cars crash more, but at least they won't take any wrong turn.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#70It seems like some folks are missing the motivation for DNSSec and suggesting TLS instead. If your threat model includes global adversaries, you have can't rely on TLS because governments can trivially compromise TLS providers and TLS exposes users to the lowest common denominator TLS. The lowest common denominator TLS (ACME DNS-1) and the mitigation to the TLS provider problem (CAA records) are both based on DNS. So…
That seems exactly backwards.
With DNSSEC zones are controlled and signed by a single authority, and for CCTLDs that authority is controlled by ... the government. If they wanted to produce a malicious signature and serve it narrowly to a targeted victim ... that's quite doable with little in the DNSSEC system to prevent it.
While it's true that there many TLS root cert operators and some probably could be compromised by a government (though I wouldn't say "trivially"), there is also a gigantic mutual destruction pact in the form of certificate transparency that means all certs issued are visible in transparency logs and there are quite sophisticated technical and social controls in place to detect malicious certs. The cert operator would be imperiling their business and future trust in a way that isn't as true for DNSSEC.