Interesting timing. DNSSEC came up on the NANOG list today -- someone sent
out an FYI to a USENIX paper [1] which shows that the law of unintended
consequences is still strong and active. In the case of DNSSEC; there is an
increased chance of a user being unable to resolve a protected domain --
particularly in APNIC.

[1]
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity13/measuring-practical-impact-
dnssec-deployment

~Matt Walker
Wikimedia Foundation
Fundraising Technology Team


On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 6:25 PM, C. Scott Ananian <[email protected]>wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 8:17 PM, Tyler Romeo <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > With that said, I think the real problem with Wikimedia's security right
> > now is a pretty big failure on the part of the operations team to inform
> > anybody as to what the hell is going on. Why hasn't the TLS cipher list
> > been updated? Why are we still using RC4 even though it's obviously a
> > terrible option? Why isn't Wikimedia using DNSSEC, let alone DANE? I'm
> sure
> > the operations team is doing quite a bit of work, but all of these things
> > should be trivial configuration changes, and if they aren't, the
> community
> > should be told why so we know why these changes haven't been applied yet.
> >
>
> I believe the short answer to your questions is: because Wikipedia lives in
> the real world.  Some of the trivial changes you describe would make the
> site inoperable for large numbers of users.  Even switching to HTTPS-only
> potentially locks out a billion or so people.
>
> That said, I'm not part of the operations team either so I can't answer
> definitively.  I agree that it would probably be useful to have more formal
> progress reporting.  "Can't disable RC4 in the cipher suite until more than
> N% of our readers are using <a set of known good browsers>" for example.
>  There has been discussion elsewhere on wmf lists about metrics reporting.
>  Once the blockers were quantified, it would be easier for interested
> people to 'count the days' until greater security could be enforced, or to
> bring pressure to bear on upstream providers (of the chrome browser, of DNS
> root zones, etc) where security fixes are needed.
>
> Zack: what would probably be useful is to compile your list of suggestions
> into a number of specific issues in bugzilla (enable DNS sec, disable RC4,
> etc).  Some of these probably already exist in bugzilla, they should be
> uncovered.  A tracking bug or wiki page could collect all the different
> bugzilla tickets for anyone who wants the big picture.
>   --scott
>
> --
> (http://cscott.net)
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