Re: [xwiki-devs] DNSSEC update and client side certificates - xwiki-devs@xwiki.org

20 Mar 2010

In an interview of Dan Kaminsky last year he says the following:

[[
Kaminsky: DNSSEC is interesting not because it fixes DNS. DNSSEC is interesting because it
allows us to start addressing core problems we have on the Internet in a systematic and
scalable way. The reality is: Trust is not selling across organizational boundaries. We
have lots and lots systems that allow companies to authenticate their own people, manage
and monitor their own people and interact with their own people. In a world where
companies only deal with themselves, that's great. We don't live in that world and
we haven't for many years.

Q: How does DNSSEC help fix that?

Kaminsky: One of the fascinating elements of the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report
is that if there was a hack, 40% of the time it was an implementation flaw, and 60% of the
time it was an authentication flaw -- something happened with authentication credentials
and everything blew up. At the end day, why do we use passwords? It's the only
authentication technology that we have that even remotely works across organizational
boundaries, and the only thing that scales today. Our existing ways of doing trust across
organizational boundaries don't work. Passwords are failures; certificates that were
supposed to replace passwords are not working -- period, end of discussion.

DNS has been doing cross-organizational address management for 25 years; it works great.
DNS is the world's largest PKI without the 'K.'All DNSSEC does is add keys. It
takes this system that scales wonderfully and has been a success for 25 years, and says
our trust problems are cross-organizational, and takes best technology on the Internet for
cross-organizational operations and gives it trust. And if we do this right, we'll see
every single company with new products and services around the fact that there's one
trusted root, and one trusted delegating proven system doing security across
organizational boundaries.
]] http://bit.ly/19P188

I came across this from the very interesting Wikipedia article
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSSEC

On 20 Mar 2010, at 19:44, Henry Story wrote:

...
  Hi,

 Here are two issues with X509 that were hindrances for a solution like foaf+ssl to be
deployed, but which can and are being fixed:

 1. Client Side Certificate selection
 ------------------------------------

 Browsers currently do a very bad job of allowing the user to choose his certificate
(Safari being the absolute worse). As a result I posted "Firefox Hackers Needed"

 	http://bit.ly/cQ5f48 

 earlier this week. @snej who is working at Google put up a picture of a solution for this
in Chrome  using a foaf+ssl certificate created by http://webid.myxwiki.org/

     http://bit.ly/azCXTU

 Vote for it! 

 2. Server side certificates
 ---------------------------

 One factor that people mention often with foaf+ssl is that the server has to have his own
certificate. This means registration with a CA which is costly and tedious and it does not
really solve the problems of server authentication as  Dan Kaminsky shows ruthlessly in
"Black Ops of PKI" http://bit.ly/4Uwb2K . 

 To summarise his talk, server security is in a double bind:

 1- Dan Kaminsky's DNS poisoning attack which is very well explained by Rick Van
Rein's presentation "Cracking Internet: the urgency of DNSSEC" (
http://bit.ly/2darr8 view with FFox > 3.5 as it uses ogg video) means that a DNS 
easily be hacked in 6 weeks, and a lot of money poured into the wrong people's
pockets. So there is a financial  incentive to break DNS.

 2. The solution of using https with X.509 public key cryptography's backing cannot
work because there is a race to the bottom in the way CA's issue certificates.  For
enough money it is not that difficult to become God and to pretend you are anyone.

 Given the above DNSsec has become urgent enough, that it is being deployed.

 - verisign will put .com in July http://bit.ly/dyd54E 
 - .org will be available in June http://bit.ly/abEJ28
 - .gov went dnssec in March 2009 http://bit.ly/bH27b0
 - The root will be signed July 2010 http://bit.ly/9YQMDJ
 - a map of dnssec deployment http://www.xelerance.com/dnssec/

 So listening to Dan Kaminsky you would think that he is against X509. Well certainly it
could be improved a lot, but he is not quite as negative as one may think. X.509 with
DNSsec seems to be something he thinks can work.

 What he told me after his CCC and HAR talks and what you can see in the last few minutes
of the HAR talk "X509 considered Harmful" http://bit.ly/2darr8 is that once DNS
is secure one could put the X509 (self signed even) certs into the DNS records. This would
bypass the need for CAs. [ I hope I understood him correctly ]. I am not sure what needs
to be done to make this possible with the browser vendors, but it would massively improve
security on the web.

 As a result I have fait that the global situation on the internet will only make foaf+ssl
solutions easier and more secure to deploy, enabling a completely distributed social
network to emerge, free and without the spying, as Eben Moglen author of the GPL said so
well recently http://bit.ly/brQmJz

 Henry