I've been a big advocate on the DNSSEC related lists that "Eh, the recursive 
resolver is the enemy, so validate on the client and don't bother validating on 
the recursive resolver".  

With the recent revelation that the NSA/GCHQ is doing 
packet-injection/man-on-the-side attacks on the backbone, at scale, and even 
using this to target NATO allies, I've changed my tune.  Even forget about 
NSA/GCHQ directly, they've now implicitly said that "hey, its OK" for everyone 
else to do it, too.

Backbone DNS injection allows converting a man-on-the-side attacker (who, eg, 
even with a certificate, can't intercept TLS using perfect forward secrecy, and 
who when attacking HTTP directly can only see requests before deciding what to 
do) into a full man-in-the-middle, as long as the attacker knows the target's 
recursive resolver.


Thus I've changed my tune:

1:  Recursive resolvers MUST validate DNSSEC as well as clients.  Not because I 
trust the recursive resolver, but there is now an adversary set where recursive 
resolver validation does help, and its an easier point to do.

2:  Validation failures due to bad signatures/etc MUST result in a failure 
unless specifically whitelisted.

3:  Future protocols MUST support "Connect by multiple name" semantics:  Given 
MULTIPLE names, only connect if all K names have the same IP after resolution.  
This enables multiple-validation-path DNSSEC, which is a pretty unique feature 
of DNSSEC.  I may not trust Verisign/NSA.  I certainly do not trust the 
Russians.  But I can probably trust that .com and .ru won't be subverted by the 
same parties.



--
Nicholas Weaver                  it is a tale, told by an idiot,
[email protected]                full of sound and fury,
510-666-2903                                 .signifying nothing
PGP: http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/data/nweaver_pub.asc

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail

_______________________________________________
perpass mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/perpass

Reply via email to