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Re:DNSSEC Would Not Help Prevent Microsoft’s Seizure Of Domains by JoshTriplett on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @02:00PM (#7978519)
While this article serves its intended purpose ("No, DNSSEC wouldn't help here"), I find it disappointing that it takes very little time dismissing the possibility of a technical solution preventing the hijacking ("legal" or otherwise) of a domain.

It seems unlikely that a technical solution based on the existing DNS infrastructure could prevent hijacking, but that doesn't make it impossible to design a naming infrastructure resilient against such attacks. There do exist at least some proof-of-concept technical solutions that would work, such as those based on blockchains; a production solution hardly seems impossible.

Re:DNSSEC Would Not Help Prevent Microsoft’s Seizure Of Domains by tzs on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @02:27PM (#7978684)
I wonder if most domain owners would want a system where it was not possible for a domain to be transferred against the owner's will?

As long as it is possible for domain owners to transfer ownership, it is possible to have your domain stolen if you have a security lapse that allows someone to impersonate you. If there is no mechanism to force a transfer back, then victims of that kind of domain theft will have no recourse other than to convince the thief to give it back.

I suspect that for most of us, getting hacked and impersonated would be the most likely way we would lose our domain.

Re:DNSSEC Would Not Help Prevent Microsoft’s Seizure Of Domains by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @04:32PM (#7979552)
> As long as it is possible for domain owners to transfer ownership, it is possible to have your domain stolen if you have a security lapse that allows someone to impersonate you. If there is no mechanism to force a transfer back, then victims of that kind of domain theft will have no recourse other than to convince the thief to give it back.

This is the kind of situation where you need something that will make your life hard only in proportion to the amount that you screwed up. See if you can find anything seriously wrong with the following.

Let's add a DNS record called change key. This record goes wherever there is a delegation to another nameserver. The change key signs the delegation without any timestamp and clients and resolvers cache the change key for a year. Every time the name is successfully resolved, the client resolves the change key again and resets the cache period back to a full year. The change key's corresponding private key doesn't go on any servers, it goes in a fire safe. If your servers get compromised you get out the change key, sign a revocation of the old delegation, sign the new one, and put it back in the fire safe. If you want to replace the change key (e.g. because the key length is now considered short) then you can sign the new one with the old one and present that signature to clients for a year. If you lose the change key then you can put a new one in the parent domain but no one will trust it for a year, in the meantime you can keep using the certificates signed by the old key, but for the next year you can't change the delegation and DNS resolvers will be writing errors to their logs telling the admins to investigate. If the change key is compromised then you're screwed for a year, but that's why it's offline in a locked container.

The result should be that you can't forge a delegation without anyone noticing. You can take the domain offline by just refusing to serve any records for it, you can reassign it after taking it offline for a year, you can't immediately point it somewhere else. That seems like a pretty good compromise.

Re:DNSSEC Would Not Help Prevent Microsoft’s Seizure Of Domains by chc on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @05:24PM (#7979832)
This still allows domain hijacking, just with more lag, and it has the failure mode "You are screwed for a year." As far as I can tell, this essentially makes touching DNS at all more onerous, but does not make theft particularly onerous compared to the burden added onto everything else.
Re:DNSSEC Would Not Help Prevent Microsoft’s Seizure Of Domains by sliverstorm on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @03:03PM (#7978946)
This is where, for some people, "It won't happen to me" attitudes guide the policies they advocate.

Why would I care if stolen domains aren't recoverable? I'm too smart, nobody will be able to steal mine

Re:DNSSEC Would Not Help Prevent Microsoft’s Seizure Of Domains by danyork on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @02:20PM (#7978642)
On the site where I wrote this article the scope is to talk about DNSSEC deployment (and deployment of other technologies such as IPv6). Given those parameters, I have limits on what I can talk about in terms of other technical solutions. However, if someone wants to write an article on some other site about other potential technical solutions it may be something I can link to from an update to the post.