[DNSOP] Re: [art] Re: DNS-designated Public Key Author ities (DKA)

DV/OV/EV were pricing tiers rather than meaningful security properties. The
whole edifice collapsed not because relying parties converged to some
lowest common security denominator, but because the browsers refused to
carry the green UI for the higher-tier certificates. Later, Let's Encrypt
put an end to this scam. I don't see this as an argument that without the
protective embrace of a protocol, the market will converge to an insecure
solution.

Some of you may remember Service Oriented Architecture. Consultants used to
push SOA as the better, safer alternative over REST. It probably was, but
way too complex, and REST was simple and caught up quickly in security.

Regards,
Bob Traverz


On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 1:00 PM Ben Schwartz <bemasc=
[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 1:44 PM S Kishore <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> ...
> > The moment you put a DKA designation in a https URL, you don’t know what
> the URL serves whom.
>
> I think you're describing a version of the "key consistency" problem.
> DNS does not offer any consistency guarantee (and indeed,
> authoritative DNS servers routinely serve different answers to
> particular resolvers).  Luckily, there are several good ways to ensure
> consistency, when the underlying protocol does not guarantee it:
>
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-privacypass-key-consistency-01
>
> ...
> > It is no-longer an arms-length relationship.
>
> Arms-length relationship, by indirection to some mutually trusted
> party, can certainly be achieved via HTTP (or any other transport
> protocol).  However, I don't think it's very coherent in this
> situation.  The ownership of each email address on some domain is
> determined exclusively by the domain operator.  If it decides to claim
> one of those addresses for its own use, in whole or in part, it is
> free to do so.
>
> > If you have followed the OpenPGP debates over the years, transparency of
> key discovery has always been a major theme.
>
> Absolutely, but that work should go to KEYTRANS.
>
> ...
> > Pushing important decisions
> > about trust levels out to the relying parties does not work well in
> > practice.
> >
> > Answer: Do you have any specific examples or case studies?
>
> The example on my mind is the Web PKI, where the DV/OV/EV trust
> hierarchy has effectively collapsed to just one level.
>
> > Ben > My preference would be to eliminate this TXT record from the
> design entirely.
> >
> > Answer: I am not in love with TXT records, but they have evolved to have
> no semantics
>
> My concern is not about the RR type.  My concern is about the loss of
> security from an indirection that is highly vulnerable to attack.
>
> BTW, another line of attack: an attacker operating a pass-through DKA
> could mount a significant "passive" attack, determining the metadata
> of communication without modifying any requests or responses.
>
> --Ben
>
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