Brad;
> >> And what does this have to do with DNSSEC?
> >
> > The theory explains the reality that public key cryptography
> > (including DNSSEC) is not used for serious purposes.
>
> Not used for serious purposes?!?
No, not at all.
> Okay, let's have you run a B2B
> website where billions of dollars can be moved with the click of a
> single mouse button. Now, we have to ensure that you really are
> interacting with the real B2B website and not some clever fake, or
> worse, some site that performs a man-in-the-middle attack on you
> while you are conducting a real transaction, so that they can later
> go in and conduct multiple fake transactions.
Are you saying that the B2B website gladly accept a billion dollar
order from some unkown company just because a CA says the company's
domain name is not faked?
Purely techinically, if secret is shared between the website and the
company, shared key cryptography protect you from a clever fake and a
MITM attack.
But, it is not enough credential to perform serious commercial
transaction. The website should check credit status of its
members.
> How about home banking? Sure, hundreds, thousands, tens of
> thousands, etc... of dollars may not be a whole lot of money to you,
> but they may be the entire life savings of a family. Multiply that
> by 250 million people in the US alone, and you're talking about some
> real money.
Protection for home banking is by shared secret.
> > Such security is not useful for serious purposes, when no one is
> > really responsible if your transactions are spoofed.
>
> Okay, so we can all sue you for billions and trillions of dollars
> worth of damages when someone spoofs a DNS response packet which then
> leads us to be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Huh?
You can't ask root server operators for compasation for billions
and trillions of dollars worth of damages when someone spoofs a DNS
response.
Serious users protect them with shared secret. They don't blank-mindedly
rely on CAs not really offerring any serious compasation.
> No, in both cases. There are a multitude of heinously screwed up
> servers in this world, and a multitude of heinously screwed up
> routers, too.
And, there will be multiple screwed up CAs. Or, are there already?
So, have weakly secure Internet and DNS as a infrastructure and don't
rely on intermediate entities of servers, routers or CAs.
Masataka Ohta
