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> I'm still looking for the walk-through of how you see the attacks by a government against DNSSEC. I don't see them!

Assume we are attacking example.tld

For the US government: 1a) Use the root zone keys -- that are essentially already under their control -- to sign fake zone keys for fake .tld nameservers. 2a) Continue with 2b) below.

For the government under whose jurisdiction the .tld zone is operated: 1b) Get the zone keys for .tld using legal measures (e.g. the local equivalent of national security letters). 2b) Use the .tld zone key to sign fake example.tld zone keys for fake example.tld nameservers. 3) Serve signed records for example.tld records (via man-in-the-middle attacks).




This in practice a redelegation of the zone.

If you redelegate a zone to a new owner, that owner owns the domain for every intent and purpose, including generating signed TLS keys from pretty much any CA.

There are legitimate ways to delegate a zone, including selling it to someone else. It's not really an attack, and it's definitively not something you can protect against.


Except for the fact that there really are no owners of any zone in DNS and DNSSEC, beside the owner of the root zone. Every other zone is just a temporary delegation that lives as long as the delegation record is cached. If you go that far down, then sure, this does not constitute an attack, because the protocol does not claim to protect your "ownership" in any sense (except for the ownership of the root zone).

People do have mental models of domain ownership, though, which is founded in the contractual agreements they have with their registry. To them it feels like an attack when for a select group of people their domain lookups result in different records than for everybody else. And it makes it worse that selective (or tailored) man-in-the-middle attacks don't leave any traces behind.

> It's not really an attack, and it's definitively not something you can protect against.

Sure you can. See how namecoin cryptographically reserves domains for a certain owner. It is just a pretty big step away from the current practice of how the DNS is run.


> Except for the fact that there really are no owners of any zone in DNS

That's only true using your very own definition of ownership.

A zone has an owner in a strict juridical sense of the word. You can read in detail what this means in the relevant agreements for registrars.




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