3 ms·

doesn't this event speak for itself though?

Avamander 6mo ago
Kind-of. But there are worse things than outages when it's PKIs we're talking about. DNSSEC is also extremely opaque and unmonitored. Any compromise will not be noticed. Nor will anyone have any recourse against misbehaving roots. Fun fact, CloudFlare has used the same KSK for zones it serves more than a decade now.
- daneel_w 6mo ago
  Which is fine. Not because KSK rollover is supposedly complicated, but if you can't manage to keep your private keys and PKI safe in the first place then key rotation is just a security circus trick. But if you do know how to keep them safe, then...
  - Avamander 6mo ago
    It is not fine. Keeping key material safe is not a boolean between "permanently safe" and "leaks immediately". Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates. For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade.
    - cyberax 6mo ago
      > Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates. Nope. Key material rotation is just circus when it's done for the sake of rotation. > For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade. Or maybe an employee has compromised the new key that is going to be rotated in, while the old key is securely rooted in an HSM?
      - tptacek 6mo ago
        The point of rotation for these kinds of keys is that it limits the blast radius of what happens if an employee compromises such a key. This is sort of like how there are one or two die-hard PGP advocates who have come up with a whole Cinematic Universe where authenticated encryption is problematic ("it breaks error recovery! it's usually not what you want!") because mainstream PGP doesn't do it. Except here, it's that key rotation is bad, because of how often DNSSEC has failed to successfully pull off coordinated key rotations.
        cyberax 6mo ago
        I can see the periodic rotations used as a way to keep up the operational experience. This is indeed a valid reason, although it needs to be weighted against the increased risk of compromise due to the rotation procedure itself. I'm just saying that rotating the key just in case someone compromised it is not a great idea. Doubly so if it's done infrequently enough for the operational experience to atrophy between rotations. And yeah, I fully agree that anything surrounding the DNSSEC operations is a burning trash fire. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.
        tptacek 6mo ago
        I'm glad we agree about DNSSEC, but the rationale I'm giving you for key rotation is the same reason we use short-lived secrets everywhere in modern cryptosystems. It's not controversial (except among Unix systems administrators).
        cyberax 6mo ago
        Oh, I never disagreed about the state of DNSSEC. It's horrible. Along with the rest of the DNS infrastructure (I just had the reason to remember the DNS haiku again today, unrelated to .de). My disagreement is that I believe that DNSSEC should be fixed, rather than abandoned. And I believe that this does not actually require all that much work. And I just don't fully buy this rationale for asymmetric key rotation. It makes total sense for symmetric secrets (except for passwords).
    - daneel_w 6mo ago
      Yeah, theoretically. They "only" need continued access to CF's internal systems. Surely you're aware that the ZSK is confined to your zone and can be rotated as much as you want without having to involve the root/registrar, and with none of the risks or consequences of not knowing how to perform a KSK rollover? What's your take on the conundrum of Amazon Trust's 20+ year root cert, with which they sign a 5+ year intermediate, with which they sign a 2-month leaf?
pocksuppet 6mo ago
Let's Encrypt going down isn't equivalent to a rant about how encryption was a terrible idea from the very beginning and we should all just use unencrypted traffic.
- tptacek 6mo ago
  Pretty sure that rant doesn't exist.
  - greensh 6mo ago
    It does kinda? at least the part about to much security and it's really funny: https://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf https://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf also available as Video on YouTube.
    - sam_lowry_ 6mo ago
      I host my blog on HTTP/1.1 only. But I also have an amateur radio station and I listen occasionally to (unencrypted!) air traffic frequencies around nearby airport.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  - 0123456789ABCDE 6mo ago
    not to disagree on the merits of encryption — i'm not a clown, but scripting.com is still port 80 only, and Dave is the type to write a rant
account42 6mo ago
No?

Kind-of. But there are worse things than outages when it's PKIs we're talking about. DNSSEC is also extremely opaque and unmonitored. Any compromise will not be noticed. Nor will anyone have any recourse against misbehaving roots. Fun fact, CloudFlare has used the same KSK for zones it serves more than a decade now.

daneel_w 6mo ago
Which is fine. Not because KSK rollover is supposedly complicated, but if you can't manage to keep your private keys and PKI safe in the first place then key rotation is just a security circus trick. But if you do know how to keep them safe, then...
- Avamander 6mo ago
  It is not fine. Keeping key material safe is not a boolean between "permanently safe" and "leaks immediately". Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates. For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade.
  - cyberax 6mo ago
    > Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates. Nope. Key material rotation is just circus when it's done for the sake of rotation. > For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade. Or maybe an employee has compromised the new key that is going to be rotated in, while the old key is securely rooted in an HSM?
    - tptacek 6mo ago
      The point of rotation for these kinds of keys is that it limits the blast radius of what happens if an employee compromises such a key. This is sort of like how there are one or two die-hard PGP advocates who have come up with a whole Cinematic Universe where authenticated encryption is problematic ("it breaks error recovery! it's usually not what you want!") because mainstream PGP doesn't do it. Except here, it's that key rotation is bad, because of how often DNSSEC has failed to successfully pull off coordinated key rotations.
      - cyberax 6mo ago
        I can see the periodic rotations used as a way to keep up the operational experience. This is indeed a valid reason, although it needs to be weighted against the increased risk of compromise due to the rotation procedure itself. I'm just saying that rotating the key just in case someone compromised it is not a great idea. Doubly so if it's done infrequently enough for the operational experience to atrophy between rotations. And yeah, I fully agree that anything surrounding the DNSSEC operations is a burning trash fire. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.
        tptacek 6mo ago
        I'm glad we agree about DNSSEC, but the rationale I'm giving you for key rotation is the same reason we use short-lived secrets everywhere in modern cryptosystems. It's not controversial (except among Unix systems administrators).
        cyberax 6mo ago
        Oh, I never disagreed about the state of DNSSEC. It's horrible. Along with the rest of the DNS infrastructure (I just had the reason to remember the DNS haiku again today, unrelated to .de). My disagreement is that I believe that DNSSEC should be fixed, rather than abandoned. And I believe that this does not actually require all that much work. And I just don't fully buy this rationale for asymmetric key rotation. It makes total sense for symmetric secrets (except for passwords).
  - daneel_w 6mo ago
    Yeah, theoretically. They "only" need continued access to CF's internal systems. Surely you're aware that the ZSK is confined to your zone and can be rotated as much as you want without having to involve the root/registrar, and with none of the risks or consequences of not knowing how to perform a KSK rollover? What's your take on the conundrum of Amazon Trust's 20+ year root cert, with which they sign a 5+ year intermediate, with which they sign a 2-month leaf?

pocksuppet 6mo ago

Let's Encrypt going down isn't equivalent to a rant about how encryption was a terrible idea from the very beginning and we should all just use unencrypted traffic.

tptacek 6mo ago
Pretty sure that rant doesn't exist.
- greensh 6mo ago
  It does kinda? at least the part about to much security and it's really funny: https://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf https://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf also available as Video on YouTube.
  - sam_lowry_ 6mo ago
    I host my blog on HTTP/1.1 only. But I also have an amateur radio station and I listen occasionally to (unencrypted!) air traffic frequencies around nearby airport.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- 0123456789ABCDE 6mo ago
  not to disagree on the merits of encryption — i'm not a clown, but scripting.com is still port 80 only, and Dave is the type to write a rant

account42 6mo ago

No?