ImperialViolet

Thomas Ptacek laid out a number of arguments against DNSSEC recently (and in a follow up). We don't fully agree on everything, but it did prompt me to write why, even if you assume DNSSEC, DANE (the standard for speaking about the intersection of TLS and DNSSEC) is not a foregone conclusion in web browsers.

There are two ways that you might wish to use DANE in a web browser: either to block a certificate that would normally be considered valid, or to bless a certificate that would normally be rejected. The first, obviously, requires that DANE information always be obtained—if a lookup failure was ignored, a network attacker with a bad certificate would just simulate a lookup failure. But requiring that browsers always obtain DANE information (or a proof of absence) is nearly implausible:

Some years ago now, Chrome did an experiment where we would lookup a TXT record that we knew existed when we knew the Internet connection was working. At the time, some 4–5% of users couldn't lookup that record; we assume because the network wasn't transparent to non-standard DNS resource types. DANE records are going to be even more non-standard, are going to be larger and browsers would have to fetch lots of them because they'll need the DNSKEY/RRSIG chain up from the root. Even if DNSSEC record lookup worked flawlessly for everyone, we probably still wouldn't implement this aspect of DANE because each extra lookup is more latency and another chance for packet loss to cause an expensive timeout and retransmit.

Instead, for this we have HPKP, which is a memory-based pinning solution using HTTP headers. We also have pre-loaded pinning in Chrome for larger or more obvious targets. Thomas Ptacek seems bullish on pinning but I'm much more lukewarm. HPKP is quite complex and no doubt someone will write a “supercookies” story about it at some point, as they have for HSTS. Additionally, pinning is quite dangerous. Clients deciding that “pinning is good” have caused headaches at Google. It's also worth noting that CryptoCat has committed pinning-suicide in Chrome at at the moment due to their CA having switched intermediates between renewals. They're waiting for the release of Chrome 41 to recover.

But what about the other side of DANE: blessing certificates that would otherwise be considered untrusted? In this case, DNSSEC can be seen as something like another CA. The same problems with looking up DNSSEC records apply, but are much less painful when you only need to depend on the lookup for sites that are using DANE certificates. Indeed, Chrome even supported something very like DANE for a while. In that case the DNSSEC records were contained in the certificate to avoid the latency and complexity of looking them up in the client. (DNSSEC records contains signatures so need not be transported over the DNS protocol.)

But support for that was removed because it was a bunch of parsing code outside of the sandbox, wasn't really being used and it conflicted with two long-term plans for the health of the HTTPS ecosystem: eliminating 1024-bit RSA and Certificate Transparency. The conflicts are probably the most important reasons for not wanting to renew the experiment.

The effort to remove 1024-bit RSA from HTTPS has been going for years and is, perhaps, nearing completion now. (That noise that you can hear is my colleague, Ryan Sleevi, crying softly.). There are still some 1024-bit root certificates, but they are nearly gone from the Mozilla set. The amount of work involved is an order of magnitude greater than you expect because of the interactions of different X.509 validation libraries, intermediate chains and varying root stores on different platforms and versions.

DNSSEC, however, is littered with 1024-bit RSA. You literally can't avoid it because the root zone transits through a 1024-bit key. DNSSEC has them because of (I think) concerns about the size of responses and they are usually rotated every two or three months. The RFC suggests that 1024-bit RSA is good for “most zones” until 2022. Dan Bernstein's paper on Batch NFS deals well with the question of whether that's wise.

Next, Certificate Transparency is our effort to add strong, technical audits to the CA system by creating a trustworthy log of all valid certificates. CT logs only accept certificates from CA as an anti-spam measure but people can create DANE certificates for domains at will. This is far from an insurmountable problem, but it is a problem that would need to be solved and the CT team already have their hands full with the staged rollout of CT in Chrome.

The 1024-bit RSA problem isn't insurmountable either (although it's baked in much deeper), so it's possible that browsers might accept a DNSSEC signature chain in a certificate in the future, but it's a long way out.