DNS root zone is now signed

The DNS root zone is now signed via DNSSEC. The idea behind DNSSEC is that the owner of a zone (roughly a domain) generates a public key and their DNS servers will digitally sign the records they serve up. Intermediate DNS servers will preserve those signatures, allowing querying machines to determine whether the records have been altered from what the authoritative nameserver sent. This makes it a lot harder to do a man-in-the-middle attack against DNS, hijacking a caching nameserver (say one belonging to an ISP) in order to re-route traffic to an attacker's servers. Not impossible, but it's a lot more involved. That's because the public key needed to verify a signature is returned from the zone above the signed zone and is signed by that zone, eg. the public key for silverglass.org's records is returned from the .org zone's server and the key for the .org zone is returned by the root nameservers. So for an attacker to forge silverglass.org records, he has to subvert the entire chain back to the root. Each verifying machine has the single key for the root zone pre-loaded (and presumably verified out-of-band to make sure it's valid), so it's infeasible to fake signatures on records for the TLDs (eg. .com, .org, .us). If I can control the records returned for .org queries I can substitute my key for silverglass.org's, allowing me to forge signatures on silverglass.org records. But since I can't substitute my key for the root key I can't fake signatures of the .org records containing the silverglass.org key, and any verifying server will detect my forgery.

That's great for security, but it poses a problem for some (IMO unethical) ISPs and DNS providers like Network Solutions. That's because they've been playing a game: when someone asks for a domain that doesn't exist, instead of returning NXDOMAIN (non-existent domain) for the query they've returned a valid result for the name pointing at their servers which serve up advertising, search results and the like. Essentially they take ownership of every single invalid domain and slap their advertisements on it. But as soon as downstream DNS servers (eg. the ones in every home router) start verifying DNSSEC signatures, the gravy train ends because those ISPs and DNS providers have no way of forging valid signatures. The only exception is that the registry operator can forge results for completely unowned domains within it's scope, and the most common DNS software around has a flag to stop that (TLD servers are expected to only delegate to 2LD servers, they should never return actual results so any results they try to return must be faked and should be treated as NXDOMAIN).

Cloud storage-as-a-service

Triggered by an article by Phil Jaenke.

You probably saw the announcement about EMC's Atmos Online shutting down. ArsTechnica had an article about it too. The short and sweet: if you were using Atmos Online directly, they aren't guaranteeing anything (including you being able to get your data back out). If you're an enterprise thinking about cloud storage as an alternative to maintaining expensive disk and/or tape in-house to hold all your archival data, this gives you something to think about.

Now, frankly, you should've been thinking about this anyway from the moment you started thinking about contracting with a vendor to store your data. Putting the magic word "cloud" in the name doesn't change the basic fact: you're putting your data in someone else's hands. When you do that you always, always account for things like "How do I get my data back from them?", "What happens if their facilities suffer damage?" and "What happens if they decide to shut down?". And you don't depend entirely on contract terms and penalties. Knowing that you can take your vendor to court and force them to pay up eventually, maybe, assuming they haven't declared bankruptcy, doesn't get you the archival data you need, and the IRS and the financial auditors and the rest won't really care whose fault it is that you can't get at data you're legally required to have available because it's your responsibility regardless.

There's also another question: how about security and privacy? Yes, against hackers attacking your supplier's network, but not just against them. What happens when your supplier gets served with a court order demanding they turn over your data to the other party in a lawsuit you're involved in? Some of that data might be e-mails between you and your legal department or outside attorneys, and reasonably subject to attorney-client privilege. But your attorneys won't get a chance to review anything before it's turned over, because you won't know it's been turned over until after the fact. How does your supplier handle this kind of situation? What steps are you taking to insure that you can't be bypassed when it comes to getting at your data?

So when IT or management asks about cloud storage, make them answer those sorts of questions first. Or at least make them think about those sorts of questions.

Oh, and the service Phil wrote about? Notice that it uses standard NAS protocols to talk to it's device, and standard formats for the stored data. That makes the question of "How do I get my data back?" a lot easier to answer.