dnscurve and DNS hardening, was Re: Dan Kaminsky

Thu Aug 6 01:17:01 UTC 2009

>>> http://dnscurve.org/crypto.html, which is always brought up, but
>>> never seems to solve the problems mentioned.

> As I understand it, dnscurve protects transmissions, not objects.
> That's not the way DNS operates today, what with N levels of cache.  It
> may or may not be better, but it's a much bigger delta to today's
> systems and practices than DNSSEC is.

I took a closer look, and I have to say he did a really good job of 
integrating dnscurve into the way DNS works.  Each request and response is 
protected by PKI, sort of like per message TLS.  The public key for a 
server is encoded into the server's name, and the one for a client is 
passed in the packet.  The name server name trick gives much of the zone 
chaining you get from DNSSEC.

He doesn't say anything explicit about chained caches, but it seems pretty 
clear that you's have to tell the client cache about the server cache's 
key at the same time you tell it the server cache's IP address.

It seems to me that the situation is no worse than DNSSEC, since in both 
cases the software at each hop needs to be aware of the security stuff, or 
you fall back to plain unsigned DNS.

R's,
John