Re: [Doh] Mozilla's plans re: DoH

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Apr 1, 2019 at 1:32 PM Brian Dickson <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 2:18 AM Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> I’ve heard a number of questions about Mozilla’s plans around
>> DoH. We’ve made a number of public statements, but it might be useful
>> to try to put this all in one place.
>>
>> In context, the problem we are attempting to solve here is attack on
>> the user’s name resolution from an attacker with full or partial
>> control of the network, as contemplated by Section 3 of BCP 72 as well
>> as BCP 188. There’s ample evidence of monitoring/manipulation of user
>> traffic via this vector [0][1][2].
>>
>
>> [1]
>> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity17/sec17-pearce.pdf
>>
>
> Looking specifically at the problem statement and evidence, I have a
> question about this (or any other) investigative work:
> Has there been any related/follow-up work, or other similarly scoped work,
> to examine the use of DNSSEC in the domains tested, that you're aware of or
> can point folks at?
>

> I.e. Were any of the manipulated domains signed DNSSEC domains, where
> validation might have prevented the manipulated responses from being
> accepted from the resolver?
>
> Clearly there would still be the issue of being able to find/reach a
> resolver that does not manipulate results, but at least the manipulation
> would be detected/blocked.
>

I don't have much more information than is in the paper (you'll note I'm
not an author), but generally DNSSEC doesn't help that much here. You can't
safely do DNSSEC validation on user-facing clients because of a combination
of tampering by middleboxes (typically record stripping, etc,. not really
"attacks") and errors in the published DNSSEC records.
-Ekr


> (Percentages overall, and percentages in the manipulated results groups,
> would both be interesting and informative.)
>
> Brian
>