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Announcements In-the-news

new RFC “Specification for DNS over Transport Layer Security (TLS)”

The Internet RFC-7858, “Specification for DNS over Transport Layer Security (TLS)”, was just released by the ITEF as a Standards Track document.

From the abstract:

This document describes the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) to provide privacy for DNS. Encryption provided by TLS eliminates opportunities for eavesdropping and on-path tampering with DNS queries in the network, such as discussed in RFC 7626. In addition, this document specifies two usage profiles for DNS over TLS and provides advice on performance considerations to minimize overhead from using TCP and TLS with DNS.

This document focuses on securing stub-to-recursive traffic, as per
the charter of the DPRIVE Working Group. It does not prevent future applications of the protocol to recursive-to-authoritative traffic.

This RFC is joint work of Zhi Hu, Liang Zhu, John Heidemann, Allison Mankin, Duane Wessels, and Paul Hoffman, of USC/ISI, Verisign, ICANN, and independent (at different times).  This RFC is one result of our prior paper “Connection-Oriented DNS to Improve Privacy and Security”, but also represents the input of the DPRIVE IETF working group (Warren Kumari and Tim Wicinski, chairs), where it is one of a set of RFCs designed to improve DNS privacy.

On to deployments!

Categories
Papers Publications

new workshop paper “Measuring DANE TLSA Deployment” in TMA 2015

The paper “Measuring DANE TLSA Deployment” will appear at the Traffic Monitoring and Analysis Workshop in April 2015 in Barcelona, Spain (available at http://www.isi.edu/~liangzhu/papers/dane_tlsa.pdf).

From the abstract:

The DANE (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities) framework uses DNSSEC to provide a source of trust, and with TLSA it can serve as a root of trust for TLS certificates. This serves to complement traditional certificate authentication methods, which is important given the risks inherent in trusting hundreds of organizations—risks already demonstrated with multiple compromises. The TLSA protocol was published in 2012, and this paper presents the first systematic study of its deployment. We studied TLSA usage, developing a tool that actively probes all signed zones in .com and .net for TLSA records. We find the TLSA use is early: in our latest measurement, of the 485k signed zones, we find only 997 TLSA names. We characterize how it is being used so far, and find that around 7–13% of TLSA records are invalid. We find 33% of TLSA responses are larger than 1500 Bytes and will very likely be fragmented.

The work in the paper is by Liang Zhu (USC/ISI), Duane Wessels and Allison Mankin (both of Verisign Labs), and John Heidemann (USC/ISI).

Categories
Presentations

new talk “Measuring DANE TLSA Deployment” given at DNS-OARC

Liang Zhu gave the talk “Measuring DANE TLSA Deployment”, given at the Fall DNS-OARC meeting in Los Angeles, California on Oct 12, 2014.  Slides are available: http://www.isi.edu/~liangzhu/presentation/dns-oarc/dane_tlsa_survey.pdf

From the abstract:

The DANE (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities) framework uses DNSSEC to provide a source of trust, and with TLSA it can serve as a root of trust for TLS certificates. This alternative to traditional certificate authorities is important given the risks inherent in trusting hundreds of organizations—risks already demonstrated with multiple compromises. The TLSA protocol was published in 2012, and this talk presents the first systematic study of its deployment. We studied TLSA usage, developing a tool that actively probes all signed zones in .com and .net for TLSA records. We find the TLSA use is early: in our latest measurement, of the 461k signed zones, we find only 701 TLSA names. We characterize how it is being used so far, and find that around 7–12% of TLSA records are invalid. We find 31% of TLSA responses are larger than 1500 Bytes and get IP fragmented.

The work in the talk is by Liang Zhu (USC/ISI), Duane Wessels and Allison Mankin (both of Verisign), and John Heidemann (USC/ISI).