Earlier 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…
DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
71–80 of 181 posts
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#72It 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 compromise…
The fundamental difference is that with TLS you have to trust ALL certificate issuers, but with DNSSec you only have to trust your TLD and your certificate issuer. Most companies trust their home country as a matter of practicality.
Certificate transparency is cool, but it's not clear it really works for many classes of devices (particularly devices that only use one network like gaming systems or TVs). The global adversary just compromises the channels used to obtain the transparency logs and to report violations. It seems to work for mobile consumer devices like cel phones, because these devices naturally connect to many different networks, of which only some are compromised.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 compromise…
The fundamental difference is that with TLS you have to trust ALL certificate issuers, but with DNSSec you only have to trust your TLD and your certificate issuer. Most companies trust their home country as a matter of practicality. Certificate transparency is cool, but it's not clear it really works for many classes of devices (particularly devices that only use one network like gaming systems or TVs). The global ad…
All the CAs are required to log. You don't have to trust any of them.
The premise of CT isn't that every device is watching the logs in real time, such that your set-top box is somehow using it.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A log to secure TLS which clients typically obtain over a TLS connection and whose violations they report over a TLS connection. It's a circular dependency.
CT provides a guarantee like: "hopefully one of those devices will eventually connect to a non-compromised network and report the prior compromise". By observing the lack of such reports, we can be reasonably confident compromises of size N>millions are not happening, but it's difficult to reason about what compromises may be happening at small N.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A log to secure TLS which clients typically obtain over a TLS connection and whose violations they report over a TLS connection. It's a circular dependency. CT provides a guarantee like: "hopefully one of those devices will eventually connect to a non-compromised network and report the prior compromise". By observing the lack of such reports, we can be reasonably confident compromises of size N>millions are not happe…
This isn't how CT is used in the real world. It's not like OCSP.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fundamental difference is that with TLS you have to trust ALL certificate issuers, but with DNSSec you only have to trust your TLD and your certificate issuer. Most companies trust their home country as a matter of practicality. Certificate transparency is cool, but it's not clear it really works for many classes of devices (particularly devices that only use one network like gaming systems or TVs). The global ad…
All the CAs are required to log. You don't have to trust any of them. The premise of CT isn't that every device is watching the logs in real time, such that your set-top box is somehow using it.
Somebody has got to check the logs and report violations. Chrome does, so CT works mostly for the world wide web, because all websites want to work in Chrome.
For a device like a router, if the router doesn't check the logs itself, and a global adversary compromises the TLS update channel for the router, and starts distributing malicious firmware... If the router itself doesn't report the violation, for how long might such a compromise go undetected? Is there any reason to think it'd ever be detected?
CT has a bit of an implicit dependency on heterogeneous configurations - that at least some clients report violations, and that attackers cannot easily distinguish reporting clients from non-reporting clients. For homogenous configurations (like the implementations of AWS, Azure, or GCM, or the deployment of routers, IOT devices, or gaming systems), it seems like a competent global adversary would simply figure out how to go unreported for that configuration, and nobody would particularly check.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the CAs are required to log. You don't have to trust any of them. The premise of CT isn't that every device is watching the logs in real time, such that your set-top box is somehow using it.
Somebody has got to check the logs and report violations. Chrome does, so CT works mostly for the world wide web, because all websites want to work in Chrome. For a device like a router, if the router doesn't check the logs itself, and a global adversary compromises the TLS update channel for the router, and starts distributing malicious firmware... If the router itself doesn't report the violation, for how long migh…
I'm not sure why you're so fixated on this idea of client systems monitoring CT logs.
Operators who host infrastructure can and should be monitoring issuance in CT logs for domains they operate, which will allow them to identify and react to any unexpected issuance for those domains.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#78Earlier 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…
> I don't check or audit my CA's and don't think most people do either.
The people responsible for running the root stores do. And when CAs screw up, they are nuked from orbit--this has happened a few times. And they can be proactive: when Kazakhstan announced they would require all TLS connections to be MITM'd, the browsers promptly added the MITM certificate to the root store with the explicit distrust bit set, meaning that the resulting certificate error can't be clicked through, effectively breaking the internet if you tried to use that for MITM (which put the kibosh on that plan immediately).
And for another thing, I wouldn't trust the people who run the nameservers any more intrinsically than CAs. After all, the TLD that runs most of the commercial internet (.com) is run by a company that had problems when it ran a CA. There's no way to route around an untrustworthy TLD operator, and it needs to be recalled that many TLDs are literally run by state governments. And several of those governments believe the privacy of their citizens to be a bug, not a feature; giving them a more prominent role in securing privacy is not a good thing.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somebody has got to check the logs and report violations. Chrome does, so CT works mostly for the world wide web, because all websites want to work in Chrome. For a device like a router, if the router doesn't check the logs itself, and a global adversary compromises the TLS update channel for the router, and starts distributing malicious firmware... If the router itself doesn't report the violation, for how long migh…
I'm not sure why you're so fixated on this idea of client systems monitoring CT logs. Operators who host infrastructure can and should be monitoring issuance in CT logs for domains they operate, which will allow them to identify and react to any unexpected issuance for those domains.
In the attack DNSSec prevents, a client is compromised by a cert that doesn't appear in the CT logs, so infrastructure monitoring is irrelevant.
Re: DNSSEC KSK rollover breaks DNS resolution for .nz domains
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I don't check or audit my CA's and don't think most people do either. The people responsible for running the root stores do. And when CAs screw up, they are nuked from orbit--this has happened a few times. And they can be proactive: when Kazakhstan announced they would require all TLS connections to be MITM'd, the browsers promptly added the MITM certificate to the root store with the explicit distrust bit set, mea…
Everybody has to do business somewhere. Nobody can prevent the government in whose territory they do business from compromising them. The question is whether you can be compromised by all governments (TLS) or just your government (TLS+DNSSec).