Does Your Domain Have a Registry Lock?

Wow. Some random person was able to move a domain to their own account simply by whatsapp ing the registrar, telling them that they had bought the domain and were having trouble moving it.

That's it.

It makes me realize that Google's no humans policy -- is it a policy? -- is actually a strength here. My domains purchased through Google are safe from social engineering because, well, there are no humans to contact to ask them to manually move domains.

(p.s. That is not some kind of dare to hackers! I am not suggesting you prove me wrong.)

The usual "registrar lock" is the clientTransferProhibited status you see on domains... that's easily removed by social engineering the registrar.

"Registry lock" is serverTransferProhibited, the kind where both your registrar and the main registry need to agree to transfer the domain to another registrar. For instance, you can buy a .ca domain from any registrar, but you need CIRA's compliance (the issuing body for all of .ca) to enact a registry lock. This explains it a bit better: https://cira.ca/ca-domains/optimize-your-ca/registry-lock

I'm having trouble tracking down how to do this for a .com though.

PM at a large, retail domain registrar here.

Registry Lock isn't something most retail registrars will offer, because generally, the vast majority of registrants don't really need it. It's not something you can just put into your domain management panel and roll out to everyone because of all the hoops required once enabled.

That said, Brian Krebs does need it on his domain(s) for obvious reasons - his domain is a massive target for hacking - and so it's enabled on his domain with specific procedures around how updates happen when required which I won't get into.

Beyond Registry Lock, the best way to secure your domains is to have them in an account with a random username (prevents guessing to aid in social engineering vs. "firstlast" or "flast"), a strong password and 2FA. Perhaps consider a unique account email address that you only use for that registrar account since losing control of that could result in losing control of your entire domains account and all the domains in it (assuming you didn't use 2FA).

On the Registrar side, look for one with good protections to ward off social engineering against the account and domains. In our case, we have a system that requires the account holder's specific consent (obtained via account email) to have a support person view personal information or access the account.

So according to the article, there is:

1) "registrar lock" - a service that requires the registrar to confirm any requested changes with the domain owner via whatever communications method is specified by the registrant.

2) "registry lock" - with a registry lock in place, your registrar cannot move your domain to another registrar on its own. Doing so requires manual contact verification by the appropriate domain registry.

So... I assume the "lock thingy" within most registrars' interfaces (I'm familiar with the one within Namesilo, the registrar I use), is the less restrictive "registrar lock" ?

For really important domains, there was MarkMonitor, the high-end registrar. But they've been acquired by an analytics company, so now it's necessary to wait a few years to see if they are still trustworthy.

It's useful to trademark your domain name. That gives you a very likely win if things ever get to the ICANN dispute process.

Confused, how do you get a registry lock then? Do you have to email your registrar? Why is there so little info on this? Or is this the same thing as clientTransferProhibited that is often provided?

> With a registry lock in place, your registrar cannot move your domain to another registrar on its own. Doing so requires manual contact verification by the appropriate domain registry, such as Verisign — which is the authoritative registry for all domains ending in .com, .net, .name, .cc, .tv, .edu, .gov and .jobs.

Putting a 'registry' lock into place has upside and downside. As mentioned in the story the downside is in an emergency it's harder to make a change because of the friction of another step to make a change (and that means any change even DNS servers).

That said it still doesn't prevent social engineering. The implication in the article is that if you social engineer a CSR at a registrar the registrar having to have another step to get a domain unlocked (contact the registry ie in the case of .com et all Verisign) then someone will say 'hmm let's be sure on this'. In theory why would this happen? Once someone has been social engineered that's that, right? (I mean sure it's another step and sure that could mean someone thinks more but...)

Now let's say you take care of a domain using registry lock. What is the tradeoff if someone gains access to your dns servers and you need to change those servers but you can't do that easily because a domain is registry locked and now you need to depend on a registrar to contact the registry and get that done. How quickly will that happen?

My point is it's not a non-trivial decision to make at all and the downside has to be taken into consideration.

One last point. There are procedures in place if a domain is transferred to another registrar to get it back to the original registrar. The best advice is to setup some kind of manual monitoring (not dependent on a registrar) where you periodically check the registry whois for the domain and note any changes to it (dns or otherwise).

I'm not able to find a registry lock on google domains. There is a lock feature but i'm assuming that is a registrar lock

I was never aware of this, and it appears only a tiny handful of TLDs support it. I think BK is overstating the case:

> a more stringent, manual (and sometimes offline)

How is it more stringent? Who's to say the registry (eg verisign) will do any more stringent of an unlock process than the registrar?

Ah yes, domains, my dad registered a domain for me and when he passed away; we missed a payment and the registrar swiftly decided to release the domain and now I lost it. Gone is my [firstname].com now the current owner of the domain tries to buy [firstname] from me on insta, twitter etc.

This is about a Dutch registrar being social engineered. I specifically chose a Dutch registrar for my Dutch company, thinking that it would be so much harder for non-Dutch people (99% of the world) to social engineer a Dutch registrar. I guess not.

I usually register my important domains for several years in the future, and have the register lock on. Some registrars call it transfer lock.

I also Backorder my own domains on namejet, GoDaddy, etc just in case they ever do expire there’s still a chance to get them back.

If only there was a company that offered domain name insurance, to make sure you never lose your domain, it’s never stolen, dns isn’t hijacked, and the site never goes down (ddos attacks, etc.).

> had already protected their domain with a “registrar lock,” a service that requires the registrar to confirm any requested changes with the domain owner via whatever communications method is specified by the registrant.

Wrong. That is not true. Although some registrars might 'confirm any requested change' that is neither ubiquitous or required by ICANN etc.

Safenames provides a registry lock service for about 500$ per year. Cloudflare and Markmonitor cost thousands.

Same thing happened to the high profile domain Sex.com by sending a fax. It was almost impossible to get back, and the criminal made millions in the meantime.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com

this is one of the things that Russians got right; you had to show up in person (and show your passport), or provide a notarized sale contract, if you want to transfer a .ru domain. At least that's how it used to be, could be different now

DNS takeover is a huge issue, but some kinds of mitigation like Registry Lock (as opposed to Registrar Lock aka clientTransferProhibited) also seem to be fairly inherently pricey. It requires multiple actual humans involved, like for .com having the right person actually pick up the phone at the registrar and get in touch with Verisign. Cloudflare offers it for example, but only for their enterprise class Custom Domain Protection [1] service, which they explicitly describe as "high touch" or "very manual", since the whole point is that it's a fully offline/out-of-band communication requirement.

In principle it seems to me that there could be a "per-incident" price model that would more accessible to more general DNS users who setup their core domain DNS and touch it once a decade, where a flat upfront $200 payment (spit balling) enables Registry Lock and two uses, after which the fee must be paid again for more. The idea here is that you'd directly be paying the $100/hour or whatever it costs a couple of engineers to take time for this each time, on the logic you'd be using it very infrequently. This would avoid ongoing subscription costs which might be easier to justify for non-enterprises, while still being feasible for a registrar. I don't know of anyone who does this though.

A lot I think ultimately really does come down to the registry itself and their specific security practices, as well as fundamental tensions between stopping alterations by unauthorized people while enabling recovery by authorized-but-forgot-password-or-token-broke-or[...]-people. Supporting hardware factors for example is great, but if support can just override them that's a hole. Conversely there needs to be some fallback procedure for if a token breaks (maybe a super long key written down and put in a vault, maybe based on payment information). Some methods can be real footguns too, my current registrar for example offers IP address/range restriction options, but it's not hard to see how that could come back around to bite you in the butt in an emergency if not used quite carefully. It's one of many tough problems due to the ongoing primitive state of electronic authentication I guess.

Edit to add: useful direct quote on Register vs Registry Lock from their initial enterprise-only CloudFlare registrar launch [2]:

>"Many registrars support Registrar Lock, which prevents the registry from altering information unless the lock is explicitly removed. The problem is, if an attacker compromises your registrar account, they can unlock it and make whatever changes they want."

>"Registry Lock prevents changes by any registrar until the lock is removed. Unlocking at the registry level requires out-of-band communication between the registrar and Verisign (the global registry operator for several top-level domains), and is thus very manual. Since most registrars are volume operations, it’s very difficult to find one that takes the time to literally pick up the phone and call Verisign every time someone makes a change to their DNS settings."

So yeah I'm sure that stops attackers real well, but not exactly scalable. "[I]f you’re an organization where losing your domains would be a front-page story..." indeed!

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1: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/custom-domain-...

2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-registrar...