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80% of .gov Web Sites Miss DNSSEC Deadline
netbuzz writes "Eighty percent of US federal agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security — have missed a deadline to deploy DNS Security Extensions, a new authentication mechanism designed to prevent hackers from hijacking Web traffic. The deadline that whooshed by was Dec. 31, 2009. Experts disagree as to whether this level of deployment represents a failure or reasonable progress toward meeting a mandate set by the Office of Management and Budget in the summer of 2008. OMB officials declined to say why the agency hasn't enforced the DNSSEC deadline for executive branch departments."
I'm not a huge fan of DHS, but come on there are so many other government agencies that hardly ever get any abuse at all. DHS has had a lot of cock ups, and should be ridden hard to shape up or dissolve, but this is hardly an opening sentence kind of cock up.
Now where is the full list of orgs that have or have not done it? I suspect its going to be a lot like reading the pork report.
He's on vacation this week but will be back on Monday.
Should've been selfless. That's what you get when you get greedy for frist psot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
(1) you have a shill of a biased company selling products to the industry pushing the requirement
(2) An unrealistic deadline set by OMB initially.
This is a craptastic story.
Rumour has it All Canadian governments open TCP/UDP ports 2 through 65535.
The first one is the reserved emergency port for the Prime Minister to escape in the case of a national emergency. We tried to explain to him that's not how it works but... You know politicians...
They'll do a much better job when they gatekeep everyone's health records.
This is probably more of a classic case of unrealistic deadlines imposed on Gov't agencies/IT contractors by Gov't security desk jockies and/or congressmen without a clue. I'm sure the infrastructure is convoluted to begin with and I'm sure whatever planning testing was probably rushed. On top of that, I've never know *anything* in the government to 1) rarely meet a deadline on time, 2) accomplish a task on time without an exorbitant amount of hiccups to deal with, or 3) be successful without being strangled by miles of bureaucratic red tape. I'm not making an excuse, just seems pretty plausible considering who we are talking about here.
And how many in non-government entities deployed their DNSSEC extensions?
Fail on both accounts then. Oh well, thanks for playing!
Sure, it's always good to implement updates that improve network/computer security ... but let's face it. These deadlines are put in place primarily to ensure people actually pay attention and do the update in a reasonable amount of time. It's not like govt. had inside information that right after Dec. 31, 2009 - hackers were going to go crazy trying to exploit this DNS issue, so that was the day it really NEEDED to be implemented by, across the board.
Maybe I'm just in a sour mood right now with this stuff in general? But lately, I sense an ever-increasing amount of importance being placed on every little security patch or change, when it's just not really warranted. It seems really self-serving to those who work in the field of "computer security", because it makes a bunch of extra billable work for them - and they get to scare more people into paying them to secure things for them.
I mean, just this morning, I came into work and checked my mail, and what do I see? People on C-Net asking questions about if they should just "quit using Internet Explorer, given the recent security exploits". (Umm, let's see here.... You successfully used the thing ever since probably when? At least back in 2001 or 2002, right? And theoretically at least, it's "safer" now than EVER before, since Microsoft has been patching and upgrading the thing that whole time. So why would you suddenly determine NOW that it's just too unsafe to use again??)
And later today, I've got to waste my afternoon ensuring "PCI Compliance" because my workplace accepts credit cards once in a while, processed via an Internet-based card processing service. We don't even store *any* of the card data here, on either our systems or on paper. They just punch the stuff into the web site to do the processing, and let the processor keep the data. But *still*, simply because we do it, we have to have monthly "penetration testing" done against our firewall's IP address (among other requirements), and the stupid test claims I "fail" right now, due to issues that hardly matter in reality. (EG. It's complaining about unpatched issues with the Outlook Web Access part of Exchange, even though nobody even has access to use OWA in our company except me, as sysadmin -- and again, I'm finding it quite the stretch to see how someone hacking OWA here would magically obtain customer credit card info, given how we operate here?)
Just out of curiosity, I would love to check if my state is compliant.. How does one use NSLookup or DIG to check?? is it just a txt field, like looking for an SPF key?
Of course, to fully check I would have to check the keys from .Gov, then the key from the domain, so do either tool have the capability to "walk the tree"?
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
So does this show a lack of government IT ability. Or is it more representative of the general inertia of government. I would worry more about the former. Where the government is exposing itself to the wilds of the internet without the ability to protect itself.
DNSSEC still has some serious problems. EG, in our preliminary analysis, a shockingly large number of Netalyzr users are behind DNS resolvers that can't handle fragmented traffic. Yet a large number are behind resolvers that do request DNSSEC data.
Since DNSSEC replies are often large (and can easily be over the 1500B response limit), turning on DNSSEC could very well mysteriously slow down DNS by causing large timeouts as the UDP reply fails to arrive and the DNS resolver, after a long timeout, then resorts to a TCP connection, even when the signatures are not validated, simply because there are a lot of resolvers that request DNSSEC but actually can't handle large replies.
http://www.ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.2009/msg01513.html
Test your net with Netalyzr
Should have been first post. That's what you get when you get greedy for a first post slam.
I am the DNS admin of a federal agency. We signed two of our domains, and twice had .gov delete the keys that allowed the domains to be trusted. We then got the run-around and were lied to by the .gov admin. My management and I are now afraid to make any further progress implementing DNSSEC because .gov has made so many mistakes. It is better to be unsigned than to be signed and have the trust keys be incorrect.
Additionally, the tools to implement DNSSEC are non-trivial. A federal agency or Fortune 500 can afford to buy a Secure64 Signer. Looking forward to when I want to sign my personal domains (in .org and .com), the tools have to become much simpler and much more automated.
I manage a .gov domain for a non-federal entity. Last year I pursued DNSSEC and hosted DNS to improve availability and diversity over our on-premise DNS. Windows DNS and BIND seemed okay for DNSSEC secondaries, but signing and key rollover are high-maintenance. Maybe in the near future that will change. There are appliances I could buy for $10-20k to manage master zones and do DNSSEC, but they were out of budget. I worked with a hosted provider (dynect) for DNSSEC singing with .GOV, but that turned out to be out of budget too. So eventually I just settled on dnsmadeeasy for nominal cost, with anticipation that they'll support DNSSEC sometime in mid-2010. Basically DNSSEC for the masses doesn't seem to be there yet.
IMHO, the reason this isn't done yet is because of the org structure. OMB is responsible for administrative oversight of this type of stuff, but each department don't actually work for them obviously.
So it could be analagous to the corporate IT department sending an email to each department lead (sales, production) telling them to install certain patches to their desktop PC.
Yeah sure, the IT department has the right to give direction because the common CEO delegated that responsibility to them, but when prioritizing what is important... they aren't writing the performance review, are they?
Which is why IT department usually have actual control over such things and push the patches whether the user likes it or not. But OMB doesn't "control" .gov truly.
Again, just MHO
"New"? From: Domain Name System Security Extensions:
Oh well, "netbuzz" and KDawson are probably too young to know any better :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
1) The deadline was never really the issue.
2-4) Where's the money coming from?
It's easy to stand on a soap box and accuse everyone else of either being lazy or stupid (or both) when your project is fully funded. When you have a budget of $0 and your DNS infrastructure isn't completely centered around BIND, exactly how can you implement DNSSEC?
No CIO in their right mind is going to allow you to rip out and replace a core network service without some definitive proof that the change is going to be flawless in it's implementation.
By you comments, you're working for one of the agencies that's already implemented it. Were you a part of the team that performed the changes? If so, post your domain and let the readers help to critique your work. If you did it right, there shouldn't be any shame in saying so.
I bet 80% of .gov sites also don't have properly setup DNS, let alone DNSSEC.
eg. Try going to http://fbi.gov
Without the proper CNAME record you need to type "www" before the hostname. Silly.
using System.Awesome;
Mountains out of molehills, as per usual
case "usual": { mountain(molehill); }
?
This is what the subject line in my RSS reader (Thunderbird) just gave me:
4 Out of 5 of<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.gov Web Sites Miss DNSSEC Deadline
WTF? Are you writing this stuff in MS Word?
Because I constantly see this stupid shit. And no human would ever do something like that.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
DJB's DNS curve would have solved this problem.
The Feds spent the 90s trying to block public use of encryption anywhere in the world, but especially in the US. The excuse they used was that it would weaken their ability to eavesdrop on Commies (not that there was still a Soviet Union around by then), but they were able to interfere with the development and release of a lot of open-source software by claiming that releasing it on a public server would be export and therefore covered by the ITAR munitions export laws. They even withheld approval for "bones" versions of security software that only had hooks for crypto routines and not the crypto code itself, and for signature-only systems that had crypto code that could potentially be adapted to do encryption (i.e. anything with RSA.)
So here it is a decade or more later, and the National Information Infrastructure is less secure because they wanted to eavesdrop on Americans.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Get a real browser.
We need DNSSEC on the root, w00t, w00t! ;-)
No really, without DNSSEC on the root, I don't think we'll get proper verification process going on the resolver side.
And putting something in DNS which isn't verified is hardly useful. Maybe they will do verification within the government, that is a start.
New things are always on the horizon