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Comment by pungur | Hacker News Reader

i've never understood how any pinning of certs/ca can work after the "quantum insert" relevation from snowden?

sorry if asking stupid questions...

QUANTUM INSERT doesn't do anything an ordinary attacker couldn't do; the only difference is that NSA can effectively deploy the attack anywhere on the Internet, and an independent attacker has to fight their way to any particular vantage point. But that's a distinction that doesn't make much of a difference in protocol design.

Importantly: if NSA is part of your threat model, the hoped-for alternative that STS supersedes --- DNSSEC --- is no help. NSA controls the DNSSEC roots.

I guess DNS is doomed... =)

and we will have to start writing public keys on a distributed wall of TLDs

> NSA controls the DNSSEC roots.

Is this any more true than saying "NSA controls the web CA roots" i.e. the NSA could infiltrate one of the hundreds of certificate authorities that browsers trust and issue a malicious certificate?

If so, and if NSA is part of your threat model, then I would say that STS doesn't help very much either.

What's more interesting is the issue of transparency. Are STS clients going to be requiring that the certificates for the HTTPS resources they access are present in a certificate transparency log? CAs are allowed to issue certificates that aren't logged, for privacy reasons I suppose, but there would be no such excuse for a "DNS transparency" log of DNSSEC keys for top level domains. Logging all of these keys would be orders of magnitude simpler than logging all CA issued certificates on the web.

> NSA controls the DNSSEC roots.

No they don’t. You know better than to spread FUD, regardless of what you think about DNSSEC.

I agree with your other points, however.

Yes, they clearly and obviously do.

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