It is possible for people set their own roots, but it is not very practical to maintain them. And this is going to be particularly difficult if we ever get DNSSEC deployed in platform distributions and end-entities are configured to check their own DNS chains up to a baked-in ICANN root. It is not a sustainable model. Here is what I propose instead, it is a variation of ideas Carl Ellison and Phil Zimmerman have proposed in the past, it is thus entirely unencumbered: 1) There are multiple public signers for the apex zone signing key. These are moderately serious entities employing trustworthy hardware, secure facilities etc. They publish a CPS describing their practices. 2) Each relying party selects the subset of apex signers they are willing to trust and the conditions for accepting a signature. This may be 3 out of 5 or 4 out of 7 or anything the relying party decides. 3) Applications, Servers, etc. ship with default quorum conditions configured but these can be over-ridden. This has a number of interesting effects: 1) We have eliminated the incentive to default, not just placed controls that make it difficult to default. While an apex signatory can defect, they cannot profit unless they can persuade others to collude with them. Relying parties can make this rather unlikely by choosing apex signers that are entirely unlikely to collude (Cuba, France and the US). 2) Parties that feel that the US has too much influence in the DNS have something that they can do to counter that influence. Instead of sitting on the sidelines and throwing spanners into the works, the countries concerned about their sovereignty being infringed can start their own apex signatory authority. 3) The system can be stable over very long periods of years, centuries even, even if the apex signer authorities are not stable. This makes it viable for a corporation to be a signer. While it is most unlikely that Google will disappear in the next 5 years, any company can go bust over a course of decades, as GM and Chrysler are demonstrating. The same approach can be extended to support long term repositories of digital data. So imagine that we wanted to set up a long term repository of academic journal articles in electronic form. Most people who propose these things understand the necessity of physical duplication of the data storage, but not the need for failsafe design of the management institutions. On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Mark Andrews<marka@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > In message <p06240803c65430cf6e92@[10.10.10.117]>, Stephen Kent writes: >> Joe, >> >> You have argued that DNSSEC is not viable because it requires that >> everyone adopt IANA as the common root. > > Which isn't even a requirement. Alternate root providers just need > to get copy of the root zone with DS records and sign it with their > own DNSKEY records for the root. > > ISP's that choose to use alternate roots might get complaints however > from their customers if they are validating the answers using the > trust-anchors provided by IANA. This however should be seen as a > good thing as the ISP can no longer tamper with the DNS without > being detected. If a ISP can convince all their customers that the > alternate roots are a good thing then this won't become a issue. > >> I agree that under the >> current IANA management situation many folks may be uncomfortable >> with IANA as the root. However, in practice, the world has lived >> with IANA as the root for the non-secure version of DNS for a long >> time, so it's not clear that a singly-rooted DNSSEC is not viable >> based on this one concern. Moreover, DNSSEC is a form of PKI, an din >> ANY PKI, it is up to the relying parties to select the trust anchors >> they recognize. In a hierarchic system like DNS, the easiest >> approach is to adopt a single TA, the DNS root. But, it is still >> possible for a relying party to do more work and select multiple >> points as TAs. I would expect military organizations in various parts >> of the world to adopt a locally-managed TA store model for DNSSEC, to >> address this concern. However the vast majority of Internet users >> probably are best served by the single TA model. >> >> As for DNSCurve, I agree with the comments that several others have >> made, i.e., it doe snot provide the fundamental security one wants in >> DNS, i.e., an ability to verify the integrity and authenticity of >> records as attested to by authoritative domains, din the face of >> caching. >> >> >> Steve >> _______________________________________________ >> Ietf mailing list >> Ietf@xxxxxxxx >> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > -- > Mark Andrews, ISC > 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia > PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@xxxxxxx > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > -- -- New Website: http://hallambaker.com/ View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week, http://quantumofstupid.com/ _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf