- For the bit.ly thing; as far as I understand Gaddafi could at least theoretically order the registrar to point somewhere else and then that somewhere else could get new keys from the automated CA, right? Or am I missing something? Maybe we do want some second layer process for extra security, but couldn’t you solve this by sticking extra certificates in the record? This can also replicate the corporate solution: “trust an extra MyCorp certificate as well as the actual one.”
- So… now that I know the details of DNSSEC beyond “signed encrypted DNS,” I’m not a fan. What stops us from phasing in (beyond, elas, politics and network effects) Actually Good Signed Encrypted DNS? Specifically;
- For backwards compat, can we separate the “signed” and “encrypted” part where you stick a signature on the record which signs the hash of the record minus the signature and any other signatures?
- And then, for encryption, can you just do DNS-over-TLS or something like that? Totally separate from the signing bit; the goal of signing is that you can trust the data, the goal of encryption is that people can’t see what you’re looking up.
- And let’s say we had this nice two-layer protocol. Why do we need proofs of nonexistence? Why not just treat it like https and, when adoption is good enough, default deny insecure HTTP? Seems like another mistake in DNSSEC to have this feature at all…
For a glimpse into the idealized mental model of an idealized future I’m grasping at here:
- An abstract identity is (waves at philosophy)
- A concrete identity is a set of cryptographic keys
- Two problems:
- How do I find out the identity associated with a name. Related subproblem: key rotation and friends.
- How do I reach the given identity, over a given network; here the Internet
- You can have other naming systems. For example, a social network with E2E chat can be viewed as mapping names to identities-as-keys
- You can have other comms channels: see here again the chat, which is at a higher level than the Internet. But also SMS, Tailscale, idk… also, see different kinds of DNS records so one naming system (DNS) can handle multiple reachability kinds!
So, in short, if anyone bothered to read this brain dump, I believe a form for trustable (if you trust the source but not the nodes) hierarchical name => identity systems is a Good Idea so far, and I guess DNSSEC is not the way… but it still seems like CA is also not the way and it should really be part of DNS.
How misguided am I?
/rant