What that wall of text completely misses is the point I and others have been 
trying to make.

 

The logs have to have enough information so you don’t end up in the situation 
Let’s Encrypt is currently, and unfortunately, in.  Yes, what they did is 
compliant, and that’s exactly what most concerns me.  It’s not about Let’s 
Encrypt, which just appears to have made a mistake, it happens.  It’s about 
whether the rules need to be improved to reduce the likelihood of another CA 
ending up in the same situation.

 

As a separate issue, we’re looking into making sure we never end up in that 
situation, and as you say, other CAs should be too.  We always reserve the 
right to do things that vastly exceed minimal compliance.

 

That should be something you should support, instead of producing increasingly 
long and condescending walls of text.  I know how DNSSEC works.

 

-Tim

 

From: Ryan Sleevi [mailto:r...@sleevi.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2018 12:43 PM
To: Tim Hollebeek <tim.holleb...@digicert.com>
Cc: r...@sleevi.com; Nick Lamb <n...@tlrmx.org>; mozilla-dev-security-policy 
<mozilla-dev-security-pol...@lists.mozilla.org>; Jacob Hoffman-Andrews 
<jacob.hoffmanandr...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: 2018.05.18 Let's Encrypt CAA tag value case sensitivity incident

 

 

 

On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 12:14 PM, Tim Hollebeek <tim.holleb...@digicert.com 
<mailto:tim.holleb...@digicert.com> > wrote:

What precisely was the antecedent of “this” in your message?  Re-reading it, 
I’m not clear which sentence you were referring to.

 

The only reasons I can think of for not keeping DNSSEC signed RRs are storage 
and/or performance, and we think those concerns should not be the driving force 
in logging requirements (within reason).

 

Are there other good reasons not to keep the DNSSEC signed RRs associated with 
DNSSEC CAA lookups?

 

I believe you are operating on a flawed understanding of the value of DNSSEC 
for forensic purposes, given the statement that "I absolutely would expect 
Let's Encrypt to produce DNSSEC signed RRs that match up to their story. The 
smoking gun for such scenarios exists, and CAs are, or should be, under no 
illusions that it's their job to produce it."

 

To me, this demonstrates a flawed, naive understanding of DNSSEC, and in 
particular, its value in forensic post-issuance claims, and also a flawed 
understanding about how DNS works, in a way that, as proposed, would be rather 
severely damaging to good operation and expected use of DNS. While it's easy to 
take shots on the basis of this, or to claim that the only reason not to store 
is because disk space, it would be better to take a step back before making 
those claims.

 

DNSSEC works as short-lived signatures, in which the proper operation of DNSSEC 
is accounted for through frequent key rotation. DNS works through relying on 
factors such as TTLs to serve as effective safeguards against overloading the 
DNS system, and its hierarchal distribution allows for effective scaling of 
that system.

 

A good primer to DNSSEC can be had at 
https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/how-dnssec-works/ , although I'm sure 
many other introductory texts would suffice to highlight the problem.

 

Let us start with a naive claim that the CA should be able to produce the 
entire provenance chain for the DNSSEC-signed leaf record. This would be the 
chain of KSKs, ZSKs, the signed RRSets, as well as the DS records, disabling 
caching for all of these (or, presumably, duplicating it such that the .com KSK 
and ZSK are recorded for millions of certs).

 

However, what does this buy us? Considering that the ZSKs are intentionally 
designed to be frequently rotated (24 - 72 hours), thus permitting weaker key 
sizes (RSA-512), a provenance chain ultimately merely serves to establish, in 
practice, one of a series of 512-bit RSA signatures. Are we to believe that 
these 512-bit signatures, on whose keys have explicitly expired, are somehow a 
smoking gun? Surely not, that'd be laughably ludicrous - and yet that is 
explicitly what you propose in the quoted text.

 

So, again I ask, what is it you're trying to achieve? Are you trying to provide 
an audit trail? If so, what LE did is fully conformant with that, and any CA 
that wishes to disagree should look inward, and see whether their audit trail 
records actual phone calls (versus records of such phone calls), whether their 
filing systems store the actual records (versus scanned copies of those 
records), whether all mail is delivered certified delivery, and how they recall 
the results of that certified delivery.

 

However, let us not pretend that recording the bytes-on-the-wire DNS responses, 
including for DNSSEC, necessarily helps us achieve some goal about repudiation. 
Rather, it helps us identify issues such as what LE highlighted - a need for 
quick and efficient information scanning to discover possible impact - which is 
hugely valuable in its own right, and is an area where I am certain that a 
majority of CAs are woefully lagging in. That LE recorded this at all, beyond 
simply "checked DNS", is more of a credit than a disservice, and a mitigating 
factor more than malfeasance.

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature

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  • RE: 2018.05.18 Let's Encry... Tim Hollebeek via dev-security-policy
  • Re: 2018.05.18 Let's Encry... jacob.hoffmanandrews--- via dev-security-policy
    • RE: 2018.05.18 Let's ... Tim Hollebeek via dev-security-policy
      • RE: 2018.05.18 Le... Nick Lamb via dev-security-policy
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