Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tptacek 2717 days ago
And yet when attackers want to misissue certs for small sites (for big sites, misissuance is detected automatically and gets CAs killed), they don't exploit vulnerabilities that DNSSEC defends against. Why is that? And given that's the case, why pursue DNSSEC?

And how is any of this, any of it all, relevant in a world where registrars can simply speak RDAP to CAs? If you believe the problem is that the Internet will (to use your turn of phrase upthread) crumble away unless we secure the DNS for domain validation, why should we forklift out the entire DNS to do so, when we can just get a small group of organizations to deploy RDAP, something they're planning on deploying anyways, and then add that to the 10 Blessed Methods?

No part of DNSSEC makes any sense.

1 comments

Because the DNS as it is allows for the potential to do something similar (by getting a CA to accept fraudulent DNS response, leading them to issue a cert,) without someone seizing control of a domain otherwise.

It makes no sense not to try to secure the DNS.

Securing the DNS (a) doesn't fix the underlying problem for TLS (as you can see by the last 2 waves of CA-missuance takeover attacks, neither of which relied on wire-level DNS hijacking) and (b) adds nothing to any secure protocol, which already has to do end-to-end verification today. Despite that, DNSSEC is already the most expensive proposal we have on the table today, requiring every major site and every major piece of software to upgrade or reconfigure.

Deploying RDAP and adding it to the CA/B Forum Blessed Methods gives CA's themselves an end-to-end ability to validate domains, decisively solving the DV problem, and doesn't require any of that expense.

Explain to me again why we should choose the former over the latter?