Randy Bush wrote:
perhaps i am a bit slow. but could someone explain to me how trust in
dns data transfers to trust in an http partner and other uses to which
ssl is put?
randy
It wouldn't, which is why the original suggestion is a bad idea.
They're different issues (finding the actual address of the server you
want to talk to vs. authenticating that the server is the server you
want to talk to), and the trust doesn't transfer for multiple reasons.
Mostly it isn't a good idea because there's a big "too many eggs in one
basket" problem here... compromise of the DNS root keys not only would
cause address lookups to be as insecure as they are now (which still
works much of the time for many people), but inserting fake self-signed
certs becomes trivial.
This is nearly as bad as the argument I've seen that if we had DNSSEC we
wouldn't even need SSL's authentication, because you'd be sure you were
talking to the right server (never mind that there's demonstrated
examples of just how easy it is to reroute someone else's packets from
far away). Of course we could secure the entire routing system as well...
Matthew Kaufman
