Comment by josephg
16 hours ago
Make dns secure and put certs / public keys in dns. Control over dns already gives you the right to get tls certs. It should just be connected directly. We don’t need CAs.
16 hours ago
Make dns secure and put certs / public keys in dns. Control over dns already gives you the right to get tls certs. It should just be connected directly. We don’t need CAs.
tptacek argues that DNSSEC is too flawed to actually do this:
https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/
He's right. DNSSEC is a mess, and we should fix that. We should fix that whether or not we delete CAs because CAs rely on DNS to verify that you own your domain. If DNS isn't secure, neither are CAs.
In the long run, fixing bugs is almost always better than working around them. DNSSEC is a bug. So are CAs. We can and should fix both.
His argument is that DNSSEC is fundamentally broken, and you can't fix it via incremental improvements.
He is not arguing that DNS security cannot or should not be improved; in fact, he explicitly states the exact opposite.
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ECDSA was added to DNSSEC 3 years before that blog post in april 2012 (rfc6605).
And then for the next 10 years APNIC wrote posts about how actually using ECDSA broke resolvers.
It's going to settle into general usability at just about the time cryptographers deprecate ECC entirely!
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I have seen their comments across this site for a very long time. Unfortunately I do not respect or put any stock in what they say, because of how unbelievably rude and dogmatic they are, and always have been.
"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."
Fortunately, you can investigate this stuff for yourself and develop your own opinion. IMHO, DNSSEC doesn't actually "secure" much of anything. It can be disabled trivially by anyone operating a resolver. As I mentioned elsewhere, none of the major sites (FAANG) use it. What does that tell you?
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Making DNS secure is not trivial though. In a way that's just moving the problem.
A secure DNS is valuable whether or not we get rid of CAs, since CAs rely on DNS queries to verify domain ownership.
And if we have a secure DNS, then CAs are completely redundant. I'd much rather trust a handful of domain registrars than a handful of domain registrars, plus 100 random questionably competent organisations all over the world. Especially when any one of them can generate keys for every domain on the planet.
"Secure" doesn't mean anything. A closer (though still imprecise) descriptor is the CIA triad --- confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
A confidential DNS has real value. Without it, ISPs actively monitor customers and sell analytics about usage upstream; there are other problems, but virtually every US user faces that one. It's hard to imagine wanting to trade confidentiality off.
A high-integrity DNS is a more dubious proposition. You'd obviously rather have integrity than not, ceteris paribus, but we have effective mitigating controls for DNS forgery, so you might imagine trading it off.
Availability also sounds like a no-brainer, until you remember that almost every other component of the networking stack also has availability issues. You might not want to trade anything at all to get a more highly-available DNS, if you're going to be just as susceptible to DOS attacks because the current DDoS meta is application-layer anyways.
There are a bunch of different approaches to securing the DNS, and they make different tradeoffs.
DoH focuses on confidentiality, and has bank-shot benefits to integrity (because it breaks forgery attacks from on-path attackers). Confidentiality is its primary purpose and it trades basically everything else off.
DNSSEC makes the opposite tradeoffs: it's exclusively for integrity, provides no confidentiality, and highly prioritizes availability (that's why it has elaborate authenticated denial systems).
Depending on what you want to achieve, "secure" DNS can make sense and actually get deployed and used, as DoH is, or it can make almost no sense and see almost no uptake.
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It seems a nice thing to have indeed, but domain registrars have already a history to cede control and bend to $GOVERNMENT. We have countries already trying to MiTM all their citizens by mandating CAs injection in every device under their jurisdiction, what would be the defense against this threat in a world where registrars hold the keys to TLS encryption for the web on the TLDs they own as root? I'm not that expert in this field so I really would like to learn if it's possible.
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Isn't this what DNSSEC solves?
No, DNSSEC tries to solve one part of the security of DNS (security of records between resolvers) and does nothing for the security between the user and their DNS server. And doesn't even do a good job at the bit it tries to solve.
It should, though it achieves that goal by a chain of certificates not unlike CAs just tied to DNS. Like I said, it essentially just moves the problem.
Which might still be better, if only because it limits the surface area.
DNSSEC deployment has been anything but trivial. This APNIC post from 2024 estimated that about 1% of DNS queries were being validated via DNSSEC: https://blog.apnic.net/2024/05/28/calling-time-on-dnssec/. That's more than 25 years after the IETF first standardized DNSSEC.
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So like, the cable company now controls the certs for most consumers?
shudders
Yes. This is basically the DANE pitch. Subtextually, supporters argue that two big shifts will immediately happen:
(1) We're also rearchitect the way all DNS is done so that every lookup from every phone and laptop is fully recursive, so that everyone validates DNSSEC chains instead of relying on the AD bit that cable company DPI devices switch off.
(2) People will lose all attachment to their current domain names and simply migrate to TLDs that have policies they agree with, rather than .COM and .IO, which are under the demonstrated de facto control of the NATO IC.
That still requires trust stores to be distributed to the clients and some clients don't need that baggage on the dns. Also, dns is by default insecure, dnssec is a configuration nightmare
> That still requires trust stores to be distributed to the clients
There's no such thing as a "trust store" in practice. To be "trusted" you just need to demonstrate you have control over a DNS TXT record, and we don't need a special "store" or intermediary for that.
Certificate authorities are an artifact of a bygone time and an entirely different model of internet infrastructure.
The trust store refers to the collection of parties that ultimately verify the signed claim of your control over a domain, which might have taken the form of a DNS TXT challenge (or any other number of challenges). You still need it, because there would otherwise be a basic circularity when determining whether to trust a connection.
(Moving the PKI into DNS does not remove it, it just moves it around.)
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But how do you make DNS secure without CAs?
You just have one big one on the root.
(Half joking).
Better to trust 1 organisation than trust 100.
Is that a reference to the Root Key of DNSSEC?
Perhaps browser fans will check the source code to verify that their browsers or operating systems using DoH ("Private DNS" or whatever they call it) check the certificates presented by DoH providers against CT logs
The dependency of "accetpable", i.e., not self-signed, TLS certificates on DNS, i.e., a domain name in a TLD created by "ICANN", is funny when one considers that the traffic to authoritative nameservers is still unencrypted. It stands to reason that DoH and other "accepted" forms of "DNS security" are only to stop ISPs from stealing Silicon Valley's surveillance advertising racket. Neither is "DNSSEC" providing the user with any real "security"; it's protecting a monopoly. The "security" is against anyone who might try to use domains names not blessed by "ICANN"
Indeed there's no need for CAs just as there is no need for ICANN
*acceptable