Herman: Shipping Rust in Firefox

Posted Jul 14, 2016 18:01 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Herman: Shipping Rust in Firefox by Lennie
Parent article: Herman: Shipping Rust in Firefox

> That depends, let's say we would start to depend on such a system. You would have validating DNS-resolver on your host (laptop/PC/phone). In that case most people wouldn't notice if NSA/FBI/whatever did a MITM between them and their upstream (caching) DNS-server as long as the NSA/FBI/whatever also generated fake TLD-signnatures.
Before the root zone was signed, it had been common to sign side chains. And it's still possible to use custom roots of trust for specific TLDs.

It makes little sense for .com (it's managed by the US anyway), but it makes more sense for smaller TLDs.

> No, I meant something like Bitcoin for the root / TLDs might be a good idea.
Might make sense.

Herman: Shipping Rust in Firefox

Posted Jul 14, 2016 18:28 UTC (Thu) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link] (1 responses)

> > That depends, let's say we would start to depend on such a system. You would have validating DNS-resolver on your host (laptop/PC/phone). In that case most people wouldn't notice if NSA/FBI/whatever did a MITM between them and their upstream (caching) DNS-server as long as the NSA/FBI/whatever also generated fake TLD-signnatures.
> Before the root zone was signed, it had been common to sign side chains. And it's still possible to use custom roots of trust for specific TLDs.
>
> It makes little sense for .com (it's managed by the US anyway), but it makes more sense for smaller TLDs.
>

I don't understand a 100% what you mean, but if you are an attacker you won't be signing a whole TLD if that was what you were implying, you would obviously be doing live signing.

Herman: Shipping Rust in Firefox

Posted Jul 14, 2016 19:52 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

But, if your operation is to remain stealthy, you need to sign every response I see for the duration of the appropriate TTLs; thus, instead of being only needing to MITM one Internet access session plus compromise one trusted CA (which is all you need in the current CA/B Forum PKI setup), you need to MITM every DNS query I send or receive for a week (that being the TTL of DS records in the root). If you don't, you run the risk that I'll see the "real" key, and discover that there's perfidy afoot.