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DNSSEC Advances in gTLDs; Bernstein Intros DNSCurve
coondoggie writes "Seven leading domain name vendors — representing more than 112 million domain names, or 65% of all registered names — have formed an industry coalition to work together to adopt DNSSEC. Members of the DNSSEC Industry Coalition include: VeriSign, which operates the .com and .net registries; NeuStar, which operates the .biz and .us registries; .info operator Afilias Limited; .edu operator EDUCAUSE; and The Public Interest Registry, which operates .org." The gTLD operators are falling in line behind government initiatives, which we discussed last month. In light of these developments, Dan Bernstein's push for DNSCurve might face an uphill slog. Reader data2 writes: "Dan Bernstein, the creator of djbdns and daemontools, has created his own proposal to improve upon the current DNS protocol. He has been opposed to DNSSEC for quite some time, and now he has proposed a concrete alternative, DNSCurve. He has posted a comparison between the two systems. His proposal makes use of elliptic curves, while DNSSEC favors RSA. He uses a curve named Curve25519, which he also developed."
Why is it necessary to use a new one when old ones have been demonstrated to be effective and secure?
He's pushing a new piece of software, not at all a new algorithm. In particular, Old-RSA-style product-of-primes encryption has been deprecated by the NSA for several years now, and shouldn't be used in any new software. Elliptical curve technology is one of the alternatives recommended by the NSA.
Bernstein may *be* an ass, but he's not *talking out of* his ass.
Industry coalitions are great, but this seems to be an attempt to create a new de facto standard controlled by a few large corporate interests
You've just described almost every successful engineering standard. As someone who has served on an international standards committee, let me say: the standard *is* what the vendors who control the market *do*, otherwise it's just a piece of paper. A useful and productive standards committee is formed when the few large corporate interests (who collectively have most of the market share in some space) get together and say "let's all agree to do things the same way".
Otherwise you end up with a meaningless standarded ignored by products that represents 90% of a market, like the early days of the HTML "standard". Wow, that's useful.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
DNSSec pre-signs all DNS records. In order to "sign" "no such record" responses, it is necessary to sign a list of records that don't exist in a zone. This effective publishes your entire zone as a side effect.
DNSCurve encrypts and authenticates the transaction, like SSL. This has the side effect of not needing to publish the entire zone. Instead of getting the public key from special DNSKEY records, DNSCurve stores it in existing NS records, encoded in the server name.
I would like to use DNSKEY records if available, otherwise use the specially encoded servername. That scheme could also gradually transition to widespread DNSKEY support, since both the encoding and DNSKEY could be used. DNSSEC could even use the encoded servername idea - but the names would be *really* long thanks to the longer RSA keys.