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>Instead, update the browser UX, which is the only thing leaving us hostages to the CA system. This is only the case if you mean the browser UX as it relates t
by pedrocr 13y ago
>Instead, update the browser UX, which is the only thing leaving us hostages to the CA system.
This is only the case if you mean the browser UX as it relates to site owners and not site users. For users the only browser UX they should need to know about is the browser being able to tell them with confidence "this communication is [not] secure".
So why go through all this hackery to patch up the broken CA system vs just distributing the TLS keys through DNSSEC? That way you get a complete chain of trust all the way to the DNS root, validating both HTTP and the initial DNS response. Then you can really tell the user that the communication is tamper-proof without any gotchas about rogue CAs and certificate pinning.
- tptacek 13y agoDNSSEC is just another PKI, but this time controlled by world governments. I'm baffled by how anyone could think that DNSSEC is a superior alternative to the CA system. The good news about DNSSEC is that it's never going to happen anyways. Meanwhile, TACK strikes a balance between the convenience/stability of having a third-party trust anchor that can vouch for your identity, while at the same time putting site owners in control of how strong that voucher is, by allowing them to bind their identity directly with clients. You could in theory pin a self-signed certificate, if that was your thing.
- pedrocr 13y ago>DNSSEC is just another PKI, but this time controlled by world governments. I'm baffled by how anyone could think that DNSSEC is a superior alternative to the CA system. We rely on DNS anyway so what can those world governments do with a DNSSEC PKI that they can't do with DNS as is? I mean if you can change the DNSSEC distributed certificate for google.com surely you can just redirect google.com and be done with it.
- tptacek 13y agoNo. We do not rely on DNS now. The whole design of TLS is premised on the notion that the DNS is insecure. Much to NSA's annoyance, if I switch MAIL.GOOGLE.COM in the DNS, I cannot easily MITM people's Gmail sessions.
- pedrocr 13y ago>Much to NSA's annoyance, if I switch MAIL.GOOGLE.COM in the DNS, I cannot easily MITM people's Gmail sessions. If the user is using a new browser or has an expired HSTS header, wouldn't it actually be trivial to do? Or are you also relying on TACK to say "never connect to mail.google.com without TLS" or on HTTP/2.0 to mandate TLS everywhere?
- tptacek 13y agoIf the whole CA system is compromised, you mean?
- pedrocr 13y agoMy assertion is that absent some way to force TLS from the start on the connection owning DNS allows you to MITM a user that types mail.google.com in the address bar. Where is that wrong?
- tptacek 13y agoChromium will not let you connect to MAIL.GOOGLE.COM via port 80; the fact that Gmail requires TLS is pinned just like their certificate is.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- spindritf 13y agoThis is true but those governments already control the domain name system, so they can yank or redirect your domain. You're already trusting the registry so why not have them sign your certificate? There's nothing stopping your from pinning it later, too. Also, that way you could limit your trust to one entity per tld. Unlike today where any CA anywhere in the world can sign any certificate.
- tptacek 13y agoI feel like I have to keep saying this over and over: no, you do not rely on the domain name system for security. TLS was designed to assume that the DNS was totally insecure. Yes, world governments can yank GOOGLE.COM so you can't reach it at all. But what they can't easily do is stand up a different MAIL.GOOGLE.COM and reliably collect people's mail. However, if were were stupid enough to stick TLS certificates into the DNS...
- michaelmior 13y agoI find it hard to believe that a government agency couldn't easily present a forged certificate perceived as valid by popular browsers if they were so inclined.
- tptacek 13y agoThey can, which is why Google pins certificates, and why there are dynamic pinning proposals.
- spindritf 13y agoCouldn't you also pin a certificate if it was distributed over DNS? DANE would make setting up ssl simpler for operators of small sites while not compromising the ability of big players, like Google, to deploy their own security mechanisms.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]