Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The roots of the DNS tree are controlled by world governments. The roots of the DNSSEC PKI are the roots of the DNS tree. And, no, the point of DNSSEC isn't solely to prevent cache poisoning; in fact, the motivating use case for DNSSEC in 2014 is DANE, which replaces the CA hierarchy with DNSSEC.

View on HN

Assuming that the governments really could just manipulate the root at will(every root, which is many machines, remember)... the only thing they could do is break DNSSEC. The DS hints would not match the KSK of the tld zone otherwise...unless of course every government in the world was in on it together...illuminati, free-masons, oh the Rothchilds are in on it too I think. Seriously, this is a borderline absurd statement. The only way to manipulate the root in a way that allows DNSSEC to work otherwise is to redirect all traffic for every tld to new government owned servers with a matching KSK in place. Not very realistic.

It would be useful to put forward a single credible scenario where "world" governments can use the DNS root private key in any fashion without detection. It is impossible to have a reasoned debate about DNSSEC with straw men like this.

Are you familiar with the CAP theorem, or do you believe that it's impossible for one query to a globally distributed database to get a different answer for the same question than every other query?

Every time someone tells me that DNSSEC tampering would be "detectible", it always seems premised on the idea that everyone sees the same data. Of course, attackers will isolate their targets and attack them surgically.

What's worse, none of what you're talking about is cryptographic. This is protection by dint of being lucky enough to be on the right part of the network to be hard to attack. No sound cryptosystem works like that.

I thought your first comment was just grumbling, but this comment suggests some misunderstanding.

The root zsk is split over a group (Shamir share) held by mostly non-US key holders. (One from the US is Dan Kaminsky, whose work and my user name has special relevancy for you. You'd agree he's not part of the US government.)

I believe all the key holders are trustworthy, and if any were not, you'd need a majority (5 of the 7) to subvert the zsk. So an xkcd-wrench-style attack on the key by governments would require implausible circumstances.

The key ceremony is video taped and can be watched:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9j-sfP9GUU

Other TLDs (some being countries) also hold key signing ceremonies and video tape them. You can watch other countries perform key signing as well. But these sovereign zsks are subordinate to the ICANN community held keys. I.e., it's more accurate (than your statement) to say that there are seven people walking the earth who have parent keys over actual country soveriegn zones. And while you might not know all these people yourself, they're from the DNS operator and hacker community. If anything, you're 180 degrees wrong in your statement that governments run DNSSEC.

You can read more about the DNSSEC root zone key management process and people (non-governmental) online. Here are informal press stories with the usual set of mistakes and minor errors:

  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/28/seven-people-keys-worldwide-internet-security-web

  https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/07/dnssec_root_key.html

And the root DNSSEC operation in general:

   http://www.root-dnssec.org/

I don't see the government in DNSSEC. Not even ICANN can alter the root zsk (but they are of course instrumental in any key roll over, since they manage the physical facilities where the "DNSSEC Seven" must be iris scanned, etc., to sign any proposed new root key).

It would be good if we actually had CA hierarchy, I wouldn't call the current CA system a hierarchy[]: any Root CA can issue a valid certificate for any domain, all Root CAs are equal in power, a compromise of any* of them allows valid certificates to be issued for anything. Sure there are protections like certificate pinning, etc. but still the more Root CAs you have, the higher the risks.

I think that reducing the amount of organizations controlling your particular branch of DNS is good. You may trust the US CA issue cert for US sites, those are more or less under their control anyway, but you probably don't want to trust them for .eu sites. Or why should I trust the Chinese CA for anything but chinese sites?

And more to the point: why should a CA be allowed to issue a cert for a site that already has a cert issues by another CA.

DNSSEC is hierarchic, there is one key for example.com. in the parent zone com., if someone else wants to put a key for example.com. into com. they'll have to replace it. Presumable the owner of example.com. would monitor its own record in com. and notice tampering. You can't easily have random CA issuing certs for your sites without being detected.

Of course having only a single entity is not good again, because then you introduce a single point of failure.

[*] well of course at the X509 level you have subordinate CAs, and a hierarchy, but it is in no way tied to DNS.

I'm not sure I see how the roots of the DNS tree are controlled by world governments. Here are the root servers: http://www.root-servers.org/ They are controlled by a wide range of organizations scattered all over the world.

The data in root "." is controlled by ICANN, a US corporation. The data in the most important gTLD, .com, is run by Verisign on contract with the US Chamber of Commerce. The ccTLDs (.fr, .tw, etc.) are controlled by world governments.

Sure, the root and major TLDs are anycasted across the globe, but the "wide range" of organizations are just mirroring content that is in one way or another controlled by world governments, and given (for example) ICE domain seizures, it would be prudent not to over-rely on DNS. Personally I support DNSCurve as a means to secure DNS, not to replace security we already have elsewhere.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I've worked with the ICANN DNS people enough and am aware of their practices enough (ex. https://www.iana.org/dnssec/icann-dps.txt ) that I don't see how the root zone could be compromised without people knowing.

Separately, DNScurve is interesting, but really solves a different problem than DNSSEC. I find this a useful comparison: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/45770/if-dnssec-...

By definition a tree has a single root. Please specify what you mean be "roots".

The private key of the DNS root was split in seven parts held by seven people [1]. It is stored in two HSMs, one on the east coast of the United States, one on the west coast. Could the NSA or some other agency have gotten hold of the private key? Probably. But spinning that as "the DNSSEC root is controlled by the governments" is FUD.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/28/seven-security-experts-get...

When DNSSEC says "bit.ly" is correct and valid, what organizations or entities could have messed with the results?

The concern that the Lybian TLD registry might fake NS and/or DS records of 2LDs applies equally to unsigned and signed zones. So if that is a concern, why use an untrusted TLD, or why use DNS at all?

If you do not trust the Lybian TLD, configure a negative trust anchor for that TLD in your resolver.

Alternatively, if you want to pin that TLD to a particular KSK, configure that KSK as a (positive) trust anchor in your resolver.

If you do not trust the IANA at all, disable the IANA root in your resolver and add trust anchors for the domains you trust. Use lookaside validation if you find that too cumbersome and want to let others do that work for you.

Why did you pick an example that does not use DNSSEC? It seems your thesis would be a lot stronger if you used a top and second level domain that actually implemented DNSSEC:

  root@fw:~# unbound-host  -t A -v bit.ly
  bit.ly has address 69.58.188.39 (insecure)
  bit.ly has address 69.58.188.40 (insecure)

More: http://dnssec-debugger.verisignlabs.com/bit.ly and http://dnsviz.net/d/bit.ly/dnssec/

I can't tell if you are trying to deliberately miss the point.

If those in charge of ly decided to implement dnssec, then who is in charge with respect to GP.

> Why did you pick an example that does not use DNSSEC?

Because I'm trying to illustrate how much additional security you might or might not get if you added DNSSEC, especially with regards to government entities.

The answer is "N/A." The .ly tld is not signed so DNSSEC could never attest to the authenticity of the A record for bit.ly.

In order for this to be a useful exercise you should structure the question in such a way that there is as much potential for government interference as possible. (Unless you are looking for a specific answer and you are trying to lead the respondent.) Government interference with DNSSEC is not limited to the `.` zone. Or put another way, DNSSEC's attack surface area is not limited to the sacred KSK.

If bit.ly implemented DNSSEC exactly to spec, and it appears clean to a user, who could be an attacker and in what way?

Anyone can be an attacker that can exert influence (legal/kinetic/digital) over:

  Here:        .
  Here:     .ly.
  Here: .bit.ly.

The attack surface of freebsd.org is similiar except there is a different set of actors that can exert legal influence over .org.

  Here:             .  # G/K/D same as bit.ly
  Here:         .org.  #   K/D same as bit.ly
  Here: .freebsd.org.  #   K/D same as bit.ly

Reply on news.ycombinator.com