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The Web of Trust isn't better, it's just better than nothingThe Web of Trust isn't better, it's just better than nothingPosted Feb 19, 2010 15:06 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)Parent article: Trust, but verify
Actually what's currently missing is the central authority. It's not that SSH users don't trust anyone, it's that there is no clear authority they could look to.
DNSSEC deployment on the root (in principle this summer, check http://www.root-dnssec.org/) provides such a central authority, or rather, it provides a hierarchy with a central authority, and OpenSSH is already set up ready to be able to trust it. Just a one line config change and "ssh foo.bar.com" implies "look up the SSH key for foo.bar.com via DNS at the same time as the address, and fail if the key doesn't match".
I'm sure some people will decide that trusting the root operators, their TLD registry and whoever serves up DNS for their machines, is not acceptable, but I expect this to be a small minority. Particularly when I consider how often I see people blindly click or type past the routine "unknown host key" message (as distinct from the scarier "host key changed" message)
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The Web of Trust isn't better, it's just better than nothing Posted Feb 20, 2010 16:37 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Unless you use only IP addresses when sshing everywhere, you're *already*
trusting the root. (Or maybe you use hosts files, yuck.)
(But! oh no! you're trusting everyone's BGP announcements as well! And
The Web of Trust isn't better, it's just better than nothing Posted Feb 22, 2010 15:36 UTC (Mon) by micah (subscriber, #20908) [Link]
>(But! oh no! you're trusting everyone's BGP announcements as well! And
> they're really easy to spoof...)
Not if you are using authentication (typically MD5 based) and ACLs, or S-BGP. If you are accepting BGP advertisements from anyone, you are asking for it. You should only accept routing updates from trusted peers, peers that you have identified as ones that you should be receiving announcements from.
The Web of Trust isn't better, it's just better than nothing Posted Feb 22, 2010 17:39 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I'm assuming that you shouldn't really trust MD5-based BGP auth these
days, either. MD5 is quite broken these days (although perhaps not broken enough to be able to forge BGP announcements with).
The Web of Trust isn't better, it's just better than nothing Posted Feb 22, 2010 19:30 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Attacks on BGP at a session level (e.g. breaking MD5 to sneak in bogus
packets) are not really the main worry when BGP systemically assumes that speakers are trusted. There are various ways you can subvert routing, including some quite ingenious, stealthy re-routing techniques described in the last few years at blackhat conferences.
The Web of Trust isn't better, it's just better than nothing Posted Mar 2, 2010 13:59 UTC (Tue) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]
> Unless you use only IP addresses when sshing everywhere, you're
> *already* trusting the root.
Am I? If I follow sound security practises (checking fp on new keys, not
If you have HashKnownHosts disabled, you can even use known_hosts as a
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