Re: [Trans] DNSSEC also needs CT

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> On 05/12/2014 02:01 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
>> The ones that matter most are the TLDs and the root.  Those get so
>> many users that they will be caught MITMing, if they do.
>
> I think technically what we care about is the public registries, not the
> TLDs.  This was my point about the public suffix list and DBOUND: that
> we care about .co.uk just as much as we care about .net.
>
> I know that some people use the term TLD to refer to the public
> registries instead of "top-level domains", but i think it's worthwhile
> to be precise in this discussion.

That's fair.  I do tend to think of co.uk. as a TLD... for lack of a
better term (is there one?), yes.  You're quite right: if a zone is
(has) a public registrar(s) then it should be audited w/o privacy.
Whereas if it doesn't sell registrar services, then it is less
important that it log names: we can assume that names below it are
roughly in the same administrative domain as the zone itself.

>> If evilhosting.com has lots of customers, then they'll help audit it,
>> else they might not.
>
> If evilhosting.com is handing out subdomains to its customers and
> expecting them to act as different administrative sub-zones, then
> evilhosting.com effectively *is* a public registry, and as such it needs
> to be auditable as well.  (it also needs to be considered a public
> registry for the sake of cookies and other same-origin policy things on
> the web, for example, so that jbonneau.evilhosting.com can't set cookies
> that would apply to dkg.evilhosting.com).

Agreed.

> Who is actually doing the monitoring and auditing is a separate
> question, though.
>
> note that CT appears to differentiate between monitoring (RFC 6962
> section 5.3) and auditing (RFC 6962 section 5.4) in this way:
>
>   Auditors make sure that SCTs are cryptographically valid against an
> STH, and that one STH chains properly to another;
>
>   Monitors make sure that the whole log itself is cryptographically
> valid, looking at all the data.
>
> Neither of these activities describes the actual checks that would need
> to happen for misissuance to be detected.  As noted in section 7.2,
> "interested parties" need to think about how to monitor to ensure that
> items with their administrative domains are not logged by other parties.

I would think that domain owners are "interested parties", and/or
maybe agents they delegate to (e.g., hosting companies).  I can audit
the logs for my domain's parent zone.  But yes, this probably needs to
be covered in more detail.  (Are there FOSS implementations of
monitors/auditors?)

> If this is neither "Monitoring" nor "Auditing" maybe we need a name for
> this kind of activity, so we can discuss it more directly?  how about
> "misissuance review"?

It seems to fall into "monitoring" given the text of the RFC.

> How does she know what logs to look in for this misissuance review?  Is
> there a way she can do this review efficiently?  I think these questions
> are relevant for regular CT as well, but a DNSSEC-focused CT adds the
> wrinkle of delegated zones.  (maybe this isn't actually worse than X.509
> PKI with its fully-delegated intermediate CAs though?)

No, it's easier!  With the name contraint-free TLS PKI the domain
owner has to check... every root CA.  With DNSSEC, which has strict
name constraints, there's only one issuer for each zone cut.

Nico
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