That said, the last few dnssec posts that got traction, tptacek tends to be at least 20% of the comments alone (ex, 55/259), ignoring word count. Today seems calm
Kind-of. But there are worse things than outages when it's PKIs we're talking about. DNSSEC is also extremely opaque and unmonitored. Any compromise will not be noticed. Nor will anyone have any recourse against misbehaving roots.
Fun fact, CloudFlare has used the same KSK for zones it serves more than a decade now.
Which is fine. Not because KSK rollover is supposedly complicated, but if you can't manage to keep your private keys and PKI safe in the first place then key rotation is just a security circus trick. But if you do know how to keep them safe, then...
It is not fine. Keeping key material safe is not a boolean between "permanently safe" and "leaks immediately".
Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates.
For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade.
> Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates.
Nope. Key material rotation is just circus when it's done for the sake of rotation.
> For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade.
Or maybe an employee has compromised the new key that is going to be rotated in, while the old key is securely rooted in an HSM?
The point of rotation for these kinds of keys is that it limits the blast radius of what happens if an employee compromises such a key. This is sort of like how there are one or two die-hard PGP advocates who have come up with a whole Cinematic Universe where authenticated encryption is problematic ("it breaks error recovery! it's usually not what you want!") because mainstream PGP doesn't do it. Except here, it's that key rotation is bad, because of how often DNSSEC has failed to successfully pull off coordinated key rotations.
I can see the periodic rotations used as a way to keep up the operational experience. This is indeed a valid reason, although it needs to be weighted against the increased risk of compromise due to the rotation procedure itself.
I'm just saying that rotating the key just in case someone compromised it is not a great idea. Doubly so if it's done infrequently enough for the operational experience to atrophy between rotations.
And yeah, I fully agree that anything surrounding the DNSSEC operations is a burning trash fire. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.
I'm glad we agree about DNSSEC, but the rationale I'm giving you for key rotation is the same reason we use short-lived secrets everywhere in modern cryptosystems. It's not controversial (except among Unix systems administrators).
Oh, I never disagreed about the state of DNSSEC. It's horrible. Along with the rest of the DNS infrastructure (I just had the reason to remember the DNS haiku again today, unrelated to .de). My disagreement is that I believe that DNSSEC should be fixed, rather than abandoned. And I believe that this does not actually require all that much work.
And I just don't fully buy this rationale for asymmetric key rotation. It makes total sense for symmetric secrets (except for passwords).
> Nope. Key material rotation is just circus when it's done for the sake of rotation.
I'm a mere sysadmin and not a cybersecurity expert. But this is always something that leaves me torn.
On the one hand, yes, rotation periods for many/most credentials are long enough that you're not really de-risking yourself all that much.
On the other hand, doing regular rotations allows you to tighten up your threat model. A regularly-rotated credential allows you to say "I implicitly trust that this credential has not been compromised prior to the previous rotation."[0] Whereas, without credential rotation, you're saying "I implicitly trust that this credential has not been compromised ever."
The latter to me seems clearly like the inferior model. The question is just whether the cost-benefit pencils out. And that is obviously very situationally dependent. That calculus doesn't pencil out when dealing with user-owned passwords for instance (i.e. the costs of regular password rotation dominate the benefits of the improved threat model). Human limitations with memory and such are the main issue there. However, that doesn't apply to e.g. hypothetical sufficiently developed DNSSEC infrastructure. Does that calculus pencil out there? I don't know. But it seems plausible at least.
[0] Modulo attackers having been able to pivot into a persistent threat with a previously-compromised credential.
Let's Encrypt going down isn't equivalent to a rant about how encryption was a terrible idea from the very beginning and we should all just use unencrypted traffic.
I host my blog on HTTP/1.1 only. But I also have an amateur radio station and I listen occasionally to (unencrypted!) air traffic frequencies around nearby airport.
What would I need to rant about? Sometimes the world does my ranting for me.
Perhaps its more fair to call it 'passionate'.
That said, the last few dnssec posts that got traction, tptacek tends to be at least 20% of the comments alone (ex, 55/259), ignoring word count. Today seems calm
"When the enemy is making a false movement, we must take good care not to interrupt him." — some guy, you wouldn't have hear of him
doesn't this event speak for itself though?
Kind-of. But there are worse things than outages when it's PKIs we're talking about. DNSSEC is also extremely opaque and unmonitored. Any compromise will not be noticed. Nor will anyone have any recourse against misbehaving roots.
Fun fact, CloudFlare has used the same KSK for zones it serves more than a decade now.
Which is fine. Not because KSK rollover is supposedly complicated, but if you can't manage to keep your private keys and PKI safe in the first place then key rotation is just a security circus trick. But if you do know how to keep them safe, then...
It is not fine. Keeping key material safe is not a boolean between "permanently safe" and "leaks immediately".
Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates.
For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade.
> Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates.
Nope. Key material rotation is just circus when it's done for the sake of rotation.
> For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade.
Or maybe an employee has compromised the new key that is going to be rotated in, while the old key is securely rooted in an HSM?
The point of rotation for these kinds of keys is that it limits the blast radius of what happens if an employee compromises such a key. This is sort of like how there are one or two die-hard PGP advocates who have come up with a whole Cinematic Universe where authenticated encryption is problematic ("it breaks error recovery! it's usually not what you want!") because mainstream PGP doesn't do it. Except here, it's that key rotation is bad, because of how often DNSSEC has failed to successfully pull off coordinated key rotations.
I can see the periodic rotations used as a way to keep up the operational experience. This is indeed a valid reason, although it needs to be weighted against the increased risk of compromise due to the rotation procedure itself.
I'm just saying that rotating the key just in case someone compromised it is not a great idea. Doubly so if it's done infrequently enough for the operational experience to atrophy between rotations.
And yeah, I fully agree that anything surrounding the DNSSEC operations is a burning trash fire. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.
I'm glad we agree about DNSSEC, but the rationale I'm giving you for key rotation is the same reason we use short-lived secrets everywhere in modern cryptosystems. It's not controversial (except among Unix systems administrators).
Oh, I never disagreed about the state of DNSSEC. It's horrible. Along with the rest of the DNS infrastructure (I just had the reason to remember the DNS haiku again today, unrelated to .de). My disagreement is that I believe that DNSSEC should be fixed, rather than abandoned. And I believe that this does not actually require all that much work.
And I just don't fully buy this rationale for asymmetric key rotation. It makes total sense for symmetric secrets (except for passwords).
> Or maybe an employee has compromised the new key that is going to be rotated in, while the old key is securely rooted in an HSM?
Also possible, but that'd be an active threat that has some probability of being caught.
Never replacing keys allows permanent compromise that can only be caught if someone directly observes misuse.
Though nobody monitors DNSSEC like that, nor uses it, so it's fine from that aspect I guess.
> Nope. Key material rotation is just circus when it's done for the sake of rotation.
I'm a mere sysadmin and not a cybersecurity expert. But this is always something that leaves me torn.
On the one hand, yes, rotation periods for many/most credentials are long enough that you're not really de-risking yourself all that much.
On the other hand, doing regular rotations allows you to tighten up your threat model. A regularly-rotated credential allows you to say "I implicitly trust that this credential has not been compromised prior to the previous rotation."[0] Whereas, without credential rotation, you're saying "I implicitly trust that this credential has not been compromised ever."
The latter to me seems clearly like the inferior model. The question is just whether the cost-benefit pencils out. And that is obviously very situationally dependent. That calculus doesn't pencil out when dealing with user-owned passwords for instance (i.e. the costs of regular password rotation dominate the benefits of the improved threat model). Human limitations with memory and such are the main issue there. However, that doesn't apply to e.g. hypothetical sufficiently developed DNSSEC infrastructure. Does that calculus pencil out there? I don't know. But it seems plausible at least.
[0] Modulo attackers having been able to pivot into a persistent threat with a previously-compromised credential.
No?
Let's Encrypt going down isn't equivalent to a rant about how encryption was a terrible idea from the very beginning and we should all just use unencrypted traffic.
Pretty sure that rant doesn't exist.
It does kinda? at least the part about to much security and it's really funny: https://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf also available as Video on YouTube.
I host my blog on HTTP/1.1 only. But I also have an amateur radio station and I listen occasionally to (unencrypted!) air traffic frequencies around nearby airport.
not to disagree on the merits of encryption — i'm not a clown, but scripting.com is still port 80 only, and Dave is the type to write a rant
He’s busy with MathAcademy earning XP-SEC
Maybe he drank a little too much Malört with the DENIC team last night?
Perhaps he's moribund