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Sure. It's yet another advantage of doing True DANE. But it still requires DNS to be reliable for the certificate issuance to work, there's no way around it. S
by cyberax 9mo ago
Sure. It's yet another advantage of doing True DANE. But it still requires DNS to be reliable for the certificate issuance to work, there's no way around it.
So why not cut out the middleman?
(And the answer right now is "legacy compatibility")
- tptacek 9mo agoI mean, the reason not to do DANE is that nobody will DNSSEC-sign, because DNSSEC signing is dangerous.
- cyberax 9mo agoCome on. It's not dangerous, it's just inconvenient and clumsy. So nobody is really using it.
- akerl_ 9mo agoOk, it's inconvenient and clumsy in ways that make it easy to shoot oneself in the foot. But that's not dangerous?
- cyberax 9mo agoWhen you shoot yourself in the foot with DNSSEC, you typically end up with a non-working setup. The biggest problem is that DNS replies are often cached, so fixes for the mistakes can take a while to propagate. With Let's Encrypt you typically can fix stuff right away if something fails.
- tptacek 9mo agoWhen you shoot yourself in the foot with DNSSEC, your entire domain falls of the Internet, as if it had never existed in the first place. It's basically the worst possible case failure and it's happened to multiple large shops; Slack being the most notorious recent example.
- cyberax 9mo agoYes, and it'd be great if DNSSEC added an "advisory" signature level. So it can be deployed without doing a leap of faith. But let's not pretend that WebPKI is perfect. More than one large service failed at some point because of a forgotten TLS certificate renewal. And more than one service was pwned because a signing key leaked. Or a wildcard certificate turned out to be more wildcard than expected. I understand the failures of DNSSEC and DNS in general. And we need to do something about it because it's really showing signs of its age as we continue to pile on functionality onto it. I don't have an idea for a good solution for everything, but I just can't imagine us piling EVERYTHING onto WebPKI either.
- tptacek 9mo agoI don't really understand most of this comment but you opened up this subthread with "Come on. It's not dangerous", and, as you're acknowledging here, it clearly is quite dangerous.
- cyberax 9mo agoDNSSEC is not dangerous. Pretty much the worst thing is breakage, not an accidental compromise. It's also more secure, compared to ACME. An on-path attacker can impersonate the site operator and get credentials. DNSSEC is immune to that.
- tptacek 9mo agoThis is a very strange definition of "dangerous".
- cyberax 9mo agoI'm mostly thinking about dangerous from the security point of view. I agree that it might not be the best from the operational point of view. DNSSEC in its current state makes DNS updates even more risky than they are, I agree with that.