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Re: Key Management, anyone?
At 11:06 AM 7/19/96 -0400, Steven Bellovin wrote:
>You see where I'm heading. Without DNSSEC, there's an unauthenticated,
>security-critical step. I'll end up with a secure connection to an
>unknown party. Sure, the certificate for that party will identify
>them as bearhands.com, not plugh.com -- but I as a user will never see
>that certificate.
Steve:
I eagerly await your writeup. I don't disagree, by the way, that there
is a big problem here. My concern is that the DNSSEC solution may be
impractical except maybe for "intranets".
I am *really* concerned if root DNS key servers will be adminstered by
Network Solutions. I also don't understand how dynamic assigned ISP
addresses will work. For example, UUNET gives me a *real* ip address
that you can look up some really ugly name for, but they're not going to
give me the private key for that name, nor have they volunteered to
put my public key in for the duration of my login, never mind the
certification issues. And they adminster the DNS servers. Besides,
best case would be your secure connection to an unknown party!
I can, however, authenticate based on my user certificate, which I
can pass on the ISAKMP id exchange. Setting up the policy for this
is going to be interesting, but seems more likely to happen.
Besides, it lets me "start small" and not rely on infrastructure.
Thanks,
Joe