I think in this instance DNSSEC would have prevented the entire attack. If I understand the sequence of events correctly, the route hijack was done to the auth DNS servers hosting myetherwallet.com. Then these rogue DNS servers redirected users to a fake myetherwallet.com.

If myetherwallet.com had been DNSSEC signed then users who validated the signature chain would have not been redirected to the fake site. But it's not DNSSEC signed.

In a BGP hijacking attack against a DNSSEC-signed zone, the attacker just looks at which IP address is in the signed A record, and then injects that prefix.

Note that "the auth servers hosting myetherwallet.com" aren't some random IP addresses in Tallinn, Estonia. It's Route53!

I get what you're saying with your counterfactual, that DNSSEC "breaks the exploit", requiring the attackers to use a slightly different exploit. But who cares? The slightly different exploit has the same predicates.

That's what's so funny about the narrative that DNSSEC has some role to play in today's attack. It would almost make sense if the narrative was "we could use DANE to get rid of all CAs and then it wouldn't matter if you could trick a DV validator". But, no, people are talking about how DNSSEC would help LetsEncrypt, in the event of a global BGP hijacking. Admit it! That's funny.

If I understand the discussion correctly, I think tptacek is right but he's not explaining his position well, which might be why he's been downvoted.

I think he's saying: let's say the correct IP address for example.com is 192.0.2.80. Instead of hijacking the prefix containing example.com's nameservers, an attacker could just hijack 192.0.2.0/24 and immediately get a DV cert. Within seconds they would be up and running and DNSSEC wouldn't have done a thing to prevent it.

DNSSEC plus CAA today would let you tell Let's Encrypt "No thanks, automation is too dangerous for my high-value names". If the hijacker fakes the answer, DNSSEC fails, Let's Encrypt says "DNSSEC failed, no issuance". If the hijacker allows the real answer, Let's Encrypt says "CAA says forbidden, no issuance".

I posted in response to pfg's comment above a mechanism that high value targets could choose, which is modelled on how Facebook behave today but (since we're proving a point here) more extreme. Make a deal with a CA, forbid all other CAs from issuing.

The other thing about Let's Encrypt is that they wouldn't be a good target for such an attacker because they are seeing the world from more than one place. You specify particularly a global BGP hijack, but those are hard, which is why this wasn't global. Tricking just, say, the original San Francisco office of Let's Encrypt doesn't get the job done.

Wouldn't https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4025 and https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4398 cover those cases?

I don't know what IPSEC has to do with this.

Your second link is a reference to what is now called DANE. There is an alternate universe in which DANE helps this problem. In that universe, there are no CAs anymore (otherwise, DANE is effectively just another CA, and attackers will just choose whichever CA allows them to execute their attack).

But DANE is already dead on arrival. Both Mozilla and Chrome flirted with DANE support a few years ago, and then withdrew it. Adam Langley wrote a post on why DANE support turned out to be untenable.

There's another big reason why you shouldn't be excited for DANE deployment, which is that it is essentially a TLS key escrow system. The most important TLDs in the world are controlled by world governments with massive SIGINT infrastructure. DANE turns those TLDs into the new Web PKI roots.

> There is an alternate universe in which DANE helps this problem. In that universe, there are no CAs anymore

There is another, even less likely, universe where DANE works. Here, every cert needs to be validated by both DANE and a CA. Security wise, this would be an improvement over just CAs. However, the large governments would still be able to MitM TLDs in their control (just patriot act some CA).

This is where I point out that the current CA system is also controlled by those who control the TLD, because domain validation depends on the DNS system. But that is an old argument.

There is some hope for the CA system through the use of certificate transparency logs. Notably, this system moves away from trusting the DNS system. Sadly, it is mostly a detection-after-the-fact system, but there is hope.

The TLS WG is currently haggling about, effectively, DANE's future. The thing up in the air was, should this technology for saying "Hi, I can do DANE" be pinned? e.g. a client sees "I can do DANE" and it says to itself "OK, I will now expect DANE certificates from this TLS service for... 24 hours? 10 minutes? 10 years? An amount of time defined in some new parameter?" Or maybe it never does this. Last I looked at the thread, it seemed like "Never do this, make yet another TLS extension to specify if you want pinning" is the choice of the working group.

(The reason this isn't an application header like HSTS is that DANE advocates want to bake this into TLS itself, so that it works without needing new application features in every single TLS-using application)

The TLS WG can haggle about DANE all it wants, but DANE is a dead letter: it was tried in two of the four major browsers and failed, and a third (Safari) briefly had nascent framework support for it and jettisoned it. Without support from the browser vendors, DANE is irrelevant.

The big problem Chrome had with DANE was that they couldn't (and presumably still can't) assume reliable DNSSEC/DANE record lookups. If you can't fail closed with DANE, then all DANE really is is another CA; attackers can "strip" DANE from connections, trivially, and be exactly where they are today. Meanwhile, end-users pay the price in latency and reduced performance for a cosmetic security improvement that most people don't care about.

So, you should not be surprised (but perhaps you are anyway) that how to work around not having DNSSEC on end systems is exactly what this work was about. Specifically, the idea is you shove DNSSEC RRs into TLS. Now the client doesn't need working DNSSEC, because the DNSSEC records were delivered with the connection. Hence the pinning question.

There's also https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4956 , which allows a domain to sign that a range of DNS entries does not exist; under this system, a client resolver could demand cryptographic proof that a domain was missing certain records, which stops the MitM RR-stripping attack.

You're describing authenticated denial, which has been a characteristic of DNSSEC since 1994.

Yes, exactly. The RFC I linked to specifically refers to Authenticated Denial in the Security Considerations section.

I'd expect there are limits to BGP hijacking. Certainly not every BGP router can hijack any IP. Moreover, the more specific the hijack, the clearer the target.

At this point in this attack, we are not sure of which domains have been hit. With a BGP attack, the specific IPs would've been quite public.