On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 2:28 PM Warren Kumari <[email protected]> wrote:

> > The second scenario you suggest is also something covered by 8555, if
> the attacker is able to fully control the network, then they can control
> ACME. This is not just the case for IP validation, if an attacker is able
> to hijack BGP routes then they are able to complete validation for both IP
> and DNS identifiers (there is currently a handful of both academic and
> industry work happening to try and mitigate these issues) and is also not
> just the case for ACME, any CA that does network based control validation,
> automated or not, is susceptible to these kinds of attacks.
>
> Yup, I've read 8555, but somehow it feels much more scary to have this
> happen for IP addresses than for DNS names -- some of this might just
> be me being triggered by expectations that addressed get reused (e.g
> DHCP), and that e.g someone on the IETF meeting network could iterate
> over all addresses, getting certificates for all of the space...
>
> This still *feels* dangerous to me...
>

What are the things you might be looking for to address the concern here?

The trouble with the scenario you've described basically requires one of
two things:
- Attackers to be proximate on the 'local' network of the validation target
(e.g. ARP poisoning)
- Attackers being able to control or influence routing tables as seen by
the issuing CA (e.g. BGP poisoning)

As Roland mentioned, both of these scenarios are no different than
dNSName-bearing certificates. dNSName suffers from issues such as DNS
spoofing/fragmentation, as we've seen. However, once the DNS has been
translated to an IP by the authoritative server, both scenarios you
describe here - ARP spoofing and BGP poisoning - are just as viable to
asserting possession of the domain name as they are the iPAddress.


It seems that the concern you've expressed here is slightly different than
the one you initially raised on the DISCUSS, and that's a question about
certificate lifetimes, and how long the assertion between a key and a
subjectAltName should be reasonably expected to be valid. The presumption
here is that domain names are "long-lived" in some form (e.g. with their
annual renewal), while iPAddresses are "short-lived" (e.g. due to DHCP
dispatching from pools). Is that a fair expression of the unease you're
expressing?

In practice, I think the concern you're expressing for IP addresses is
actually common for dNSNames too, as discussed on the topic of BygoneSSL (
https://insecure.design ), and that the solutions are largely not in the
validation space, but in defining meaningful and sensible profiles. In this
respect, an ACME method to support such iPAddress-bearing certificates
helps the problem, more than it worsens the problem, by providing coherent
and consistent APIs to facilitate shorter certificate lifetimes and clearer
management of those certificates.

Regardless of the position taken with respect to this draft document, such
certificates exist today, are recognized by major Root Stores, and
meaningfully help improve security of important services (such as DoH/DoT
to the resolver). So, hopefully that suggests it's a net-good to
standardize an approach that might be usable, in future policies, to only
permit such IP-bearing certificates iff constraints are met, such as
reduced lifetimes, automated issuance, etc.

Does that help put you at ease, with respect to this document?
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