[Infowarrior] - Internet's root zone to be secured

[Richard Forno]

At long last, internet's root zone to be secured

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/04/dnssec_coming/

VeriSign and ICANN to share DNSSEC duties

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Enterprise Security, 4th June 2009 00:27 GMT


The US government said Wednesday it plans to digitally sign the  
internet's root zone by the end of the year, a move that would end  
years of inaction securing the internet's most important asset.

The US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and  
Information Administration (NTIA) said it was turning to ICANN, or the  
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and VeriSign to  
implement the measure, which is known as DNSSEC. In October, the two  
organizations submitted separate proposals that offered sharply  
contrasting visions for putting the complicated framework in place.

"The parties are working on an interim approach to deployment, by  
year's end, of a security technology - Domain Name System Security  
Extensions (DNSSEC) - at the authoritative root zone (i.e., the  
address book) of the internet," a statement issued by the NTIA read.  
"There will be further consultations with the internet technical  
community as the testing and implementation plans are developed."

The statement left many unanswered questions about the roll-out, most  
notably the specific roles of the two organizations. It also omitted  
details about exactly how far the temporary solution would go and when  
a permanent fix can be expected.

The answers to such questions are crucial given known vulnerabilities  
in today's DNS. Last year, researcher Dan Kaminsky of security firm  
IOActive demonstrated a simple way to plant fraudulent entries in the  
root zone, which serves as the authoritative document for routing  
email, web requests, and other internet traffic. The bug had the  
potential to destroy trust as we know it on the net because it  
provided a low-cost way for criminals to hijack the websites of banks,  
government agencies, and similarly sensitive organizations.

By August, the majority of the world's DNS servers had been updated to  
resist Kaminsky's DNS cache-poisoning bug, but he warned the move was  
a temporary band-aid rather than a permanent solution.

DNSSEC is designed to fix that. It affixes a cryptographic seal to  
results returned from a DNS server to ensure that they haven't been  
forged. At the heart of the hierarchical DNS is the root zone, which  
contains the list of servers authorized to provide lookups for each  
top-level domain such as .com or .gov.

In its current form, DNSSEC has existed for about a decade but has yet  
to be implemented, largely due to the complexity and geopolitical  
tensions surrounding management of the unwieldy technology. Of  
particular importance is management of the root key because it  
controls the topmost tier of the hierarchy. Should it ever fall into  
the wrong hands, the internet could cease to function.

Under the interim solution, VeriSign will manage the root-signing key  
and ICANN will manage a separate key-signing key, Paul Levins, vice  
president of corporate affairs for ICANN told The Register.

Under last year's proposals, ICANN and VeriSign offered competing  
arguments why each should manage the root key. (The proposals and  
public comments responding to them are here.) Representatives from  
VeriSign didn't return phone calls seeking comment, and an NTIA  
spokesman declined to confirm ICANN's account.

"This is big," said Bart Forbes, the NTIA spokesman. "It's not  
something we do quickly, but we need to socialize whatever decision is  
made and make sure everyone is on board."

He declined to elaborate on the process the NTIA will use to seek  
feedback from members of the internet technical community.

ICANN is the non-profit group that was established in the late 1990s  
to oversee the internet's address system. VeriSign operates a wide  
range of businesses, including management of two of the internet's  
root-name servers and several businesses that manage digital  
certificates.

While Kaminsky and other experts claim DNSSEC is crucial for securing  
the internet, not everyone is so sure. Among then is Paul Mockapetris,  
inventor of DNS. He has long argued that widespread adoption of DNSSEC  
will be marred by the cost involve and incompatibilities across  
different systems.

"To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, this is one giant step for DNSSEC and  
one small step for the internet," said Mockapetris, who is chairman  
and chief scientist for Nominum, which sells DNS servers to service  
providers and telecos. "This will get us on the road to finding out if  
DNSSEC will work or not, but it's not going to revolutionize things  
anytime soon. ®