DNS inventor calls for security overhaul

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Randall <rvh40 () insightbb com>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 20:28:05 -0400
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: jo <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
Subject: DNS inventor calls for security overhaul

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/30224.html


DNS inventor calls for security overhaul
By John Leyden
Posted: 11/04/2003 at 21:06 GMT
Web site impersonation could become as great a risk as ID theft, Paul
Mockapetris, the co-inventor of DNS warns.

Waiting in the wings is a better security standard for the Internet's
Domain Name System. It's called DNSSec, and it uses digital signatures
to guard against impersonation. But political wrangles are holding up
adoption, Mockapetris claims.

A denial of service attack last October which took out seven of the
Internet's 13 DNS root-name servers last October, highlighted the
fragility of the Internet's addressing system. Mockapetris, chief
scientist at Internet infrastructure firm Nominum, reckons the threat
has been overplayed: people are neglecting greater, related risks, he
told us. 

Since the data in root-name servers changes infrequently a denial of
service attack has relatively little impact, unless it goes on for days,
he argues. That's because key data is cached locally by large ISPs and
enterprises. 

However an attack against country level DNS, or worse, a successful
attempt to counterfeit DNS data would have far greater impact.

To date there have been few such attacks, apart from the recent
onslaught against the Al-Jazeera network. But the current DNS system
provides no guarantees against impersonation and must be updated,
Mockapetris argues.

The Internet Engineering Task Force has yet to ratify DNSSec, designed
to underpin the system with security keys and certificates to create a
"chain of trust" in some ways similar to extranet systems. According to
Mockapetris, ratification of the standard, which has been in development
for years, is still at least six months off.

Politics, rather than technology issues, are the main reason for the
delay, he claims. Holding up progress are arguments over whether or not
to grant ICANN the role as a trusted third party signing root keys, and
disagreements over where a company should make all its domains secure at
the same time. 

Public Key Infrastructure systems have failed to storm the market as
forecast, largely because of deployment headaches and incompatibility
between different vendors.

Mockapetris believes a lightweight ("lean and mean") PKI infrastructure
built into the DNS system through DNSSec has a much greater chance of
becoming ubiquitous. The system could plug into browsers and provide for
an automatic way to exchange keys. Cryptographic work would be done at
the client by DNSSec-aware applications so DNS lookup speed will not
suffer. This approach would allow secure DNS look-up by users - even if
their own ISPs hadn't upgraded their DNS servers.

Government and financial service institutions could be using DNS Sec
within two years and the standard could become ubiquitous in five years
time, Mockapetris believes.

The system would mean surfers are guaranteed that they are taken to the
Web site they intended to visit. DNS Sec would increase safeguards and
detect attempts to impersonate sites, guarding against fraudulent Web
scams. 

Mockapetris sees the system as operating at a lower level than site
certificates, which he described as a "complementary technology. I don't
believe in the grand unification theory."

He describes DNS Sec as a first level ID check, which is still vital to
build trust on the Net. "If you don't have secure DNS, how can you trust
higher level protocols?"

A security model for DNS would bolster Web services and help secure IP
telephony. Fraud and impersonation will run rampant without this
security model, according to Mockapetris.

The DNS system provides a means for domain names to be translated into
Internet Protocol addresses. DNS underpins email delivery and Web
browsing. 

Mockapetris co-invented the domain name system (DNS) in collaboration
with the late Jon Postel) in 1983. He received an IEEE Internet Award
this year for this work. ®

External Link
Everything you ever wanted to know about DNSSec (but were too frightened
to ask)

-- 
Randall <rvh40 () insightbb com>


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