4,127 research outputs found
Securing The Root: A Proposal For Distributing Signing Authority
Management of the Domain Name System (DNS) root zone file is a uniquely global policy problem. For the Internet to connect everyone, the root must be coordinated and compatible. While authority over the legacy root zone file has been contentious and divisive at times, everyone agrees that the Internet should be made more secure. A newly standardized protocol, DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), would make the Internet's infrastructure more secure. In order to fully implement DNSSEC, the procedures for managing the DNS root must be revised. Therein lies an opportunity. In revising the root zone management procedures, we can develop a new solution that diminishes the impact of the legacy monopoly held by the U.S. government and avoids another contentious debate over unilateral U.S. control. In this paper we describe the outlines of a new system for the management of a DNSSEC-enabled root. Our proposal distributes authority over securing the root, unlike another recently suggested method, while avoiding the risks and pitfalls of an intergovernmental power sharing scheme
Leveraging upon standards to build the Internet of things
Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there were many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. Long time, most efforts were focusing on the networking layer. More recently, the IETF CoRE working group started working on an embedded counterpart of HTTP, allowing the integration of constrained devices into existing service networks. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, with a prime focus on the IETF standardization work in the ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is further complemented with some research results that illustrate how these novel technologies can be extended or used to tackle other problems.The research leading to these results has received funding from the
European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2
007-2013) under
grant agreement n°258885 (SPITFIRE project), from the iMinds ICON projects
GreenWeCan and O’CareCloudS, and a VLI
R PhD scholarship to Isam Ishaq
DSTC: DNS-based Strict TLS Configurations
Most TLS clients such as modern web browsers enforce coarse-grained TLS
security configurations. They support legacy versions of the protocol that have
known design weaknesses, and weak ciphersuites that provide fewer security
guarantees (e.g. non Forward-Secrecy), mainly to provide backward
compatibility. This opens doors to downgrade attacks, as is the case of the
POODLE attack [18], which exploits the client's silent fallback to downgrade
the protocol version to exploit the legacy version's flaws. To achieve a better
balance between security and backward compatibility, we propose a DNS-based
mechanism that enables TLS servers to advertise their support for the latest
version of the protocol and strong ciphersuites (that provide Forward-Secrecy
and Authenticated-Encryption simultaneously). This enables clients to consider
prior knowledge about the servers' TLS configurations to enforce a fine-grained
TLS configurations policy. That is, the client enforces strict TLS
configurations for connections going to the advertising servers, while
enforcing default configurations for the rest of the connections. We implement
and evaluate the proposed mechanism and show that it is feasible, and incurs
minimal overhead. Furthermore, we conduct a TLS scan for the top 10,000 most
visited websites globally, and show that most of the websites can benefit from
our mechanism
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