Re: [dnsext] DNS vulnerabilities

Nicholas Weaver <[email protected]> Fri, 1 Nov 2013 08:18:44 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.ietf.dnsop,gmane.ietf.dnsext
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Nov 1, 2013, at 7:57 AM, Derek Atkins <[email protected]> wrote:
> It is unclear to me that ECC as a generic technology is bad, although
> any specific curves creates by NIST/NSA are certainly suspect.
> 
> Having said that, Dual-EC-DRBG is a Random Number Generator, not a Hash,
> Public Key, or Cipher algorithm, and we don't use it in DNS for
> anything, AFAIK.

Random Number Generators are used to generate the key material, since bare entropy is often not enough, so you use your entropy pool to seed a pRNG.  Bind, for example, ends up using OpenSSL.

Certified versions of OpenSSL do have Dual_EC_DRBG, although its not by default (or is it?). 

The threat is probably a lot less, however, since everything else signed in DNSSEC-land is deterministic, and even if Dual_EC_DRBG was used, hopefully the raw stream doesn't leak (the backdoor requires seeing some of the random output to make it predictable).

--
Nicholas Weaver                  it is a tale, told by an idiot,
[email protected]                full of sound and fury,
510-666-2903                                 .signifying nothing
PGP: http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/data/nweaver_pub.asc

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