Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
kensey | on: eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
This all day. There is no reason I should have to go through a third-party to get a certificate just to distribute a key for secure communications (which is all a DV certificate is good for) if I already own a domain, or can get the domain owner to publish my TLSA record in theirs (which should be no more onerous than publishing the server A record, which they already have to do).

The reason we don't have DANE support in browsers is of course because Google decided not to implement it in Chrome, because (ultimately) the key lengths securing the root DNS server zones weren't large enough to suit them (at the time, 1024 bits):

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/01/17/notdane.html

And if Google wasn't going to do it, it didn't make sense for any other browser to do it either.

However, I believe the root zone keys are now longer, so I could (potentially) see Google implementing DANE in Chrome now, maybe with a Chrome-specific restriction of "TLSA records that have keys under 2048 bits in their chain of trust are ignored" (since the root zone keys are not the only keys in the chain and they want to eliminate 1024-bit RSA from Chrome). And if Google does it in Chrome, then everybody else has to do it too, so the situation flips.

tptacek | parent
DANE doesn't remove the requirement to get a 3rd party to vouch for your keys; it just locks you into one very specific 3rd party, one likely subject to de jure control of a state.
kensey | root | parent | next
It seems much less likely that even a well-funded state actor could silently subvert enough root servers, which exist in many countries, to significantly compromise DNSSEC before alarms were raised, than that CAs are actively compromised or are just bad at being CAs, resulting in a breach like this (which happens approximately all the time). And with regard to state coercion, some CAs are in fact state-run, by states most people would consider grievously corrupt.

More to the point I would trust IANA and ICANN, faults and all, to not screw up the DNS/DNSSEC root, much more than I trust every CA in the default browser trust stores to get X.509 right all day, every day.

tptacek | root | parent
Again: you don't have to touch the root servers. The root servers are a red herring here. It's the TLD operators who exercise all the real control. IANA/ICANN will have nothing to do with the resulting situation.
kensey | root | parent
See my other comment above. A malicious TLD operator is not something everyone is just powerless to deal with.
tptacek | root | parent
Short summary of my response to that comment: you're wrong, and ICANN does not in fact have the real-world power to liberate .COM from the United States Government.
loading story #50211141
loading story #50211108