4 ms·

The "better use of CAs" you describe is essentially DNSSEC.

tptacek 13y ago
Sure, if "making the DNS totally unreliable", "baking 1990s crypto into the core of the Internet", and "conceding the CA PKI to world governments" is your idea of "better use of CAs".
- dfc 13y ago
  > "conceding the CA PKI to world governments" is your idea of "better use of CAs". How much different is this than the current CA situation? Just recently a subordinate CA of ANSSI (the French Network and Information Security Agency) issued a wildcard cert that could MITM just about anything.[^1] Firefox's list of trusted CAs includes:[^2] China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) Government of France Government of Hong Kong (SAR), Hongkong Post Government of Japan, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Government of Spain, Autoritat de Certificació de la Comunitat Valenciana (ACCV) Government of Spain (CAV), Izenpe S.A. Government of The Netherlands, PKIoverheid Government of Taiwan, Government Root Certification Authority (GRCA) Government of Turkey, Kamu Sertifikasyon Merkezi (Kamu SM) Hong Kong Firefox's list of pending CAs includes additional government CAs.[^3] Things are no different in Redmond. There are at least 56 government CAs (56 of the certs start with government probably others with less obvious names) in Microsoft's Root Certificate Program.[^4] [^1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/12/09/revoking-trust-in-one-anssi-certificate/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/12/09/revoking-trust-... [^2]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-group/certs/included/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu... [^3]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-group/certs/pending/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu... [^4]: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/14217.windows-and-windows-phone-8-ssl-root-certificate-program-april-2012-e-g.aspx https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...
  - tptacek 13y ago
    It's not different from the current CA situation. That's my point.
    - dvanduzer 13y ago
      That was my point, too: the theorized system already exists. I'm definitely not advocating its use. Ultimately, the URL bar needs to go away. More fundamentally, the asymmetric relationship between very large organizations that authenticate their identity with browser CA certs, and individuals who authenticate their identity with passwords needs to change. Cryptographically generated addressing schemes like Telehash can do the automate-able stuff better than the current CA situation. The problem (and solution) I'm struggling to articulate involves the fact that granular authorization systems and trust databases need better UI before we can really fix this. I suspect cheaper hardware tokens will play a significant role.
e12e 13y ago
No, not really. DNSSEC secures DNS, allowing it to be used (among other things) as a secure transport for delivering other certificates. CAs already provide the same trust infrastructure, but due to incentives do not sign delegating certs by default, but typically charge extra for certs that allow the owner of a domain to set up their own internal CA. DNSSEC only works (reasonably) for TLDs where DNSSEC is implemented, and when DNS resolvers implement checking -- many ISPs don't. Delegating CAs are already part of SSL/TLS. DNSSEC requires fidling with the DNS information -- delegating CAs, while requiring issuing certs, only require configuration of the various services (web, imap, smtp etc) -- as per usual. For delegating CAs to improve the security of any given domain -- some infrastructure would be needed to set up an intermediate CA. I guess for small organizations, OCSP wouldn't really be needed, as the CRLs would be small (assuming different CA for public facing services and stuff like personal certs for users). Another option would be to simply roll certificates frequently.
- jackalope 13y ago
  From the article: Certificates bind a public key and an identity (commonly a DNS name) together. ...when issuing certificates a CA validates ownership of a domain by sending an email, or looking for a specially formed page on the site. So, if "DNSSEC secures DNS," as you say, why do we need certificates at all? Considering that the CA already depends on DNS to issue (many) certificates, why not cut out the middle man and simply publish the domain's public key in a DNS record? What actual value does a certificate offer other than that? I'm genuinely asking, because I'm curious if DNSSEC provides a way for a domain owner to establish trust in the domain's DNS records, that cannot be tampered with by the domain's registrar.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    I think the fundamental problem with DNSSEC is it doesn't go far enough. DNS really is the original directory service of the internet. If we could generalize it a bit, and allow TCP queries secured by Kerberos, with far better row-level security, there's no reason we couldn't replace LDAP with something a lot simpler. If we could replace LDAP with something a lot simpler, we could as replace X.509 with something a lot simpler (LDAP is a mildly simplified version of X.500, of which X.509 is a very closely related OSI legacy standard). So DNSSEC doesn't go far enough. IMO, we should be working on ensuring that it can be extended to allow for certification of hosts, etc. However, at present it doesn't do this very well.

Sure, if "making the DNS totally unreliable", "baking 1990s crypto into the core of the Internet", and "conceding the CA PKI to world governments" is your idea of "better use of CAs".

dfc 13y ago
> "conceding the CA PKI to world governments" is your idea of "better use of CAs". How much different is this than the current CA situation? Just recently a subordinate CA of ANSSI (the French Network and Information Security Agency) issued a wildcard cert that could MITM just about anything.[^1] Firefox's list of trusted CAs includes:[^2] China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) Government of France Government of Hong Kong (SAR), Hongkong Post Government of Japan, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Government of Spain, Autoritat de Certificació de la Comunitat Valenciana (ACCV) Government of Spain (CAV), Izenpe S.A. Government of The Netherlands, PKIoverheid Government of Taiwan, Government Root Certification Authority (GRCA) Government of Turkey, Kamu Sertifikasyon Merkezi (Kamu SM) Hong Kong Firefox's list of pending CAs includes additional government CAs.[^3] Things are no different in Redmond. There are at least 56 government CAs (56 of the certs start with government probably others with less obvious names) in Microsoft's Root Certificate Program.[^4] [^1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/12/09/revoking-trust-in-one-anssi-certificate/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/12/09/revoking-trust-... [^2]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-group/certs/included/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu... [^3]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-group/certs/pending/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu... [^4]: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/14217.windows-and-windows-phone-8-ssl-root-certificate-program-april-2012-e-g.aspx https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...
- tptacek 13y ago
  It's not different from the current CA situation. That's my point.
  - dvanduzer 13y ago
    That was my point, too: the theorized system already exists. I'm definitely not advocating its use. Ultimately, the URL bar needs to go away. More fundamentally, the asymmetric relationship between very large organizations that authenticate their identity with browser CA certs, and individuals who authenticate their identity with passwords needs to change. Cryptographically generated addressing schemes like Telehash can do the automate-able stuff better than the current CA situation. The problem (and solution) I'm struggling to articulate involves the fact that granular authorization systems and trust databases need better UI before we can really fix this. I suspect cheaper hardware tokens will play a significant role.

e12e 13y ago

No, not really. DNSSEC secures DNS, allowing it to be used (among other things) as a secure transport for delivering other certificates. CAs already provide the same trust infrastructure, but due to incentives do not sign delegating certs by default, but typically charge extra for certs that allow the owner of a domain to set up their own internal CA. DNSSEC only works (reasonably) for TLDs where DNSSEC is implemented, and when DNS resolvers implement checking -- many ISPs don't. Delegating CAs are already part of SSL/TLS. DNSSEC requires fidling with the DNS information -- delegating CAs, while requiring issuing certs, only require configuration of the various services (web, imap, smtp etc) -- as per usual. For delegating CAs to improve the security of any given domain -- some infrastructure would be needed to set up an intermediate CA. I guess for small organizations, OCSP wouldn't really be needed, as the CRLs would be small (assuming different CA for public facing services and stuff like personal certs for users). Another option would be to simply roll certificates frequently.

jackalope 13y ago
From the article: Certificates bind a public key and an identity (commonly a DNS name) together. ...when issuing certificates a CA validates ownership of a domain by sending an email, or looking for a specially formed page on the site. So, if "DNSSEC secures DNS," as you say, why do we need certificates at all? Considering that the CA already depends on DNS to issue (many) certificates, why not cut out the middle man and simply publish the domain's public key in a DNS record? What actual value does a certificate offer other than that? I'm genuinely asking, because I'm curious if DNSSEC provides a way for a domain owner to establish trust in the domain's DNS records, that cannot be tampered with by the domain's registrar.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  I think the fundamental problem with DNSSEC is it doesn't go far enough. DNS really is the original directory service of the internet. If we could generalize it a bit, and allow TCP queries secured by Kerberos, with far better row-level security, there's no reason we couldn't replace LDAP with something a lot simpler. If we could replace LDAP with something a lot simpler, we could as replace X.509 with something a lot simpler (LDAP is a mildly simplified version of X.500, of which X.509 is a very closely related OSI legacy standard). So DNSSEC doesn't go far enough. IMO, we should be working on ensuring that it can be extended to allow for certification of hosts, etc. However, at present it doesn't do this very well.