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Comment by iscoelho | Hacker News Reader

You're correct - noting that Lets Encrypt supports DNSSEC/NSEC fully.

Unfortunately though, the entire PKI ecosystem is tainted if other CAs do not share the same security posture.

Tainted seems a little strong, but I think you're right, there's nothing in the CAB Baseline Requirements [1] that requires DNSSEC use by CAs. I wouldn't push for DNSSEC to be required, though, as it's been so sparsely adopted. Any security benefit would be marginal. Second level domain usage has been decreasing (both in percentage and absolute number) since min-2023 [2]. We need to look past DNSSEC.

[1] https://cabforum.org/working-groups/server/baseline-requirem...

[2] https://www.verisign.com/en_US/company-information/verisign-...

I agree that DNSSEC is not the answer and has not lived up to expectations whatsoever, but what else is there to verify ownership of a domain? Email- broken. WHOIS- broken.

Let's convince all registrars to implement a new standard? ouch.

I'm a fan of the existing standards for DNS (§3.2.2.4.7) and IP address (§3.2.2.4.8) verification. These use multiple network perspectives as a way of reducing risk of network-level attacks. Paired with certificate transparency (and monitoring services). It's not perfect, but that isn't the goal.

BGP hijacks unfortunately completely destroy that. RPKI is still extremely immature (despite what companies say) and it is still trivial to BGP hijack if you know what you're doing. If you are able to announce a more specific prefix (highly likely unless the target has a strong security competency and their own network), you will receive 100% of the traffic.

At that point, it doesn't matter how many vantage points you verify from: all traffic goes to your hijack. It only takes a few seconds for you to verify a certificate, and then you can drop your BGP hijack and pretend nothing happened.

Thankfully there are initiatives to detect and alert BGP hijacks, but again, if your organization does not have a strong security competency, you have no knowledge to prevent nor even know about these attacks.

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