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Comment by NegativeK | Hacker News Reader

This article feels like an opinion piece with an axiom of perfection or nothing.

Indeed, their main grip seems to be with DV, and they seem to hold only EV certs as legitimate. They miss the entire value proposition and purpose of DVs.

MITM is a user->service concern. If someone is between a service and LE, there are much bigger problems.

EV certs seem to have basically the same verification policies that CAs had for ordinary certificates back in the early 2000s (i.e., really not that much at all), so I am intrigued as to what the DV has to offer except "it's basically self-signed but with extra steps and the rest of the world will trust it".

> If someone is between a service and LE

There is always someone there: my ISP, my government that monitors my ISP, the LE's ISP, and the US government that monitors the LE's ISP.

Certainly a MITM between a website and LE is less likely than a MITM between a user on a random public Wi-Fi network and the website, but I've often wondered why more attention hasn't been given to securing the domain validation process itself.

There are a lot of random internet routers between CAs and websites which effectively have the ability to get certificates for any domain they want. It just seems like such an obvious vulnerability I'm kinda shocked it hasn't been exploited yet. Perhaps the fact that it hasn't is a sign such an attack is more difficult than my intuition suggests.

Still, I'd be a lot more comfortable if DNSSEC or an equivalent were enforced for domain validation. Or perhaps if we just cut out the middleman and built a PKI directly into the DNS protocol, similar to how DANE or Namecoin work.

A lot of attention has been given to securing the domain validation process. The primary defense is Multi-Perspective Issuance Corroboration, which Let's Encrypt already does and all CAs will be required to do in a couple years. The idea is that you run the check from five different servers on two different continents, so that compromising just one internet router isn't enough, you have to get one on every path, which is much harder to pull off.

Also, Let's Encrypt validates DNSSEC for DNS-01 challenges, so you can use that if you like, although CAs in general are not required to do this, there are various reasons why a site operator might not want to, and most don't.

There are two fundamental problems with DANE that make it unworkable, and that would presumably also apply to any similar protocol. The first is compatibility: lots of badly behaved middleboxes don't let DNSSEC queries through, so a fail-closed system that required end-user devices to do that would kick a lot of existing users off the internet (and a fail-open one would serve no security purpose). The other is game-theoretic: while the high number of CAs in root stores is in some ways a security liability, it also has the significant upside that browsers can and do evict misbehaving CAs, secure in their knowledge that those CAs' customers have other options to stay online. And since governments know that'll happen, they very rarely try to coerce CAs into misissuing certificates. By contrast, if the keepers of the DNSSEC keys decided to start abusing their power, or were coerced into doing so, there basically wouldn't be anything that anyone could do about it.

MPIC is good but not foolproof if the website itself is being MITMd. DNSSEC validation is better but not required, as you said, and even if it were HTTP-01 would just immediately become the new weak point.

I think you're wrong about DANE's flaws applying to "any similar protocol". The ossification problem could be solved by DNS over HTTPS cutting out the middle boxes, though I agree adoption of that will take time; much as adoption of HTTPS itself has. The game theory problem has been solved by CT; as you noted. You just need to subject certificates issued through the new system to the same process.

Remember that any actor capable of siezing control of DNS can already compromise the existing PKI by fulfilling DNS-01 challenges. You're not going to be able to solve that problem without completely replacing DNS with a self-sovereign system similar to Namecoin, though I can't imagine that happening anytime soon.

Perfection is a very useful guide star. Just because it may not exist doesn't mean we shouldn't hold up deeply flawed projects to it.

Thats most articles posted to HN

I mean, it's not untypical as a view.

In reality, successful society lives halfway down tons of slippery slopes at any given point in time, and engineers in particular hate this. Yet this has been true since basically forever.

I'm sure cavemen engineers complained about how it's not secure to trust that your cave is the one with the symbol you made on the wall, etc.

Sure let's eat crap without complaint, nothing is perfect anyway. /s

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