[Ajedi32]

That paragraph does not claim DANE expands the number of trust anchors.

As magila stated, registrars are already a trust anchor for domain validated certificates. Trusting a certificate directly via DANE vs through a domain-validated certificate doesn't change that. It does, however, cut CAs out of the process, which reduces the number of trust anchors.

[tptacek]

If you can't use DANE to block certificates that the WebPKI says are valid, then you're stuck trusting both DANE and the CAs. Browsers don't trust DANE today. Ergo, adoption of DANE would expand the number of trust anchors.

[Ajedi32]

Assuming we need to keep backwards compatibility indefinitely that's true, but that still wouldn't expand the number of trust anchors. DANE isn't a new trust anchor, it's just a more direct way of trusting preexisting trust anchors (DNS registrars). Even if you don't use or support DANE you still need to trust the registrars.

[tptacek]

No, that is false. DNS registrars do not sign CA certificates and, without DANE, are not trust anchors in the WebPKI. And, of course, with DANE, they would essentially gain that status. This is a plain fact, but you can reason your way to it axiomatically by (again) considering how trust would be rescinded: Google singlehandedly killed the web's largest CA after a misissuance, but obviously cannot do that to .COM in a DANE world.

When your argument starts depending on redefinitions of well-established concepts, that's a sign that you should reconsider it.

[jcrites]

I think we are getting mixed up in this thread over multiple senses of the term "trust". One sense is PKI. Ajedi32 is referring to a different type of trust.

Everyone who uses .com must trust the authority for .com, because that registry's name servers are what delegate control of all domain names in the TLD. Every time you resolve a domain name like "example.com", you are relying on the name servers for ".com" to serve correct information.

If the registry was malicious (or if an attacker compromised it), then the registry could easily seize control of any domain name -- it could rescind the delegation and publish whatever DNS records it chooses, including the DNS records necessary to obtain a domain-validated certificate.

It is correct to say that we "trust" TLD authorities because they can do these malicious things, but they commit to behave in a certain way. We trust TLD authorities in the same way that we trust certificate authorities only to issue certificates following a certain process. Both of these actors are capable of fraudulently obtaining certificates: the CA can mis-issue a certificate directly, whereas the TLD can seize a domain's DNS and trivially procure a domain validated certificate (from a legitimate CA).

This is what I believe Ajedi32 means when referring to "trust anchor" (using the term informally). DNSSEC is not adding new trusted entities, but is rather adding PKI around an existing trust relationships: a child DNS zone (e.g. example.com) always needs to trust its parent zone (e.g. the .com TLD). In the PKI sense, I agree that it would be adding new trust anchors, but those trust anchors would simply model preexisting trust relationships that don't use PKI.

On that note, we also need to trust the Internet root name servers that point to the name servers for the TLDs.

[tptacek]

Again, this is a redefinition of the concept of a WebPKI trust anchor (or, for that matter, of a "trust anchor" in any PKI; it would be equally confusing to describe the Linux kernel as a "trust anchor" in a secret storage or XML signing or inter-services authentication PKI).

If you want to use an idiosyncratic definition of a term, that's fine --- I won't, but I can at least follow the argument. But what you can't do is say "that citation you provided does not say what you said it does" when it clearly does using the mainstream definition of the term. It's especially fallacious to pull out this semantic argument about a reliable source that generates a surprising conclusion about trust anchors!

DNSSEC adds trust anchors to the Web PKI.

Obviously, I disagree with the argument that we "need" DNSSEC to securely issue certificates, but the rest of this thread adequately captures my rebuttals to that argument.

[Ajedi32]

If you insist on such a narrow definition of the term "trust" then yes you're technically correct. But it also reduces your entire argument into one of semantics; there's no security impact to adding a new "trust anchor" as you're defining the term.