Over the past several years, domain name queries – a critical element of internet communication – have quietly become more secure, thanks, in large part, to a little-known set of technologies that are having a global impact. Verisign CTO Dr. Burt Kaliski covered these in a recent Internet Protocol Journal article, and I’m excited to share more about the role Verisign has performed in advancing this work and making one particular technology freely available worldwide.
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This is the final in a multi-part series on cryptography and the Domain Name System (DNS).
In previous posts in this series, I’ve discussed a number of applications of cryptography to the DNS, many of them related to the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC).
In this final blog post, I’ll turn attention to another application that may appear at first to be the most natural, though as it turns out, may not always be the most necessary: DNS encryption. (I’ve also written about DNS encryption as well as minimization in a separate post on DNS information protection.)
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Over the past several years, questions about how to protect information exchanged in the Domain Name System (DNS) have come to the forefront.
One of these questions was posed first to DNS resolver operators in the middle of the last decade, and is now being brought to authoritative name server operators: “to encrypt or not to encrypt?” It’s a question that Verisign has been considering for some time as part of our commitment to security, stability and resiliency of our DNS operations and the surrounding DNS ecosystem.
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Data privacy and security experts tell us that applying the “need to know” principle enhances privacy and security, because it reduces the amount of information potentially disclosed to a service provider — or to other parties — to the minimum the service provider requires to perform a service. This principle is at the heart of qname minimization, a technique described in RFC 7816 that has now achieved significant adoption in the DNS.
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Two principles in computer security that help bound the impact of a security compromise are the principle of least privilege and the principle of minimum disclosure or need-to-know.
As described by Jerome Saltzer in a July 1974 Communications of the ACM article, Protection and the Control of Information Sharing in Multics, the principle of least privilege states, “Every program and every privileged user should operate using the least amount of privilege necessary to complete the job.”
Need-to-know is the counterpart for sharing information: a system component should be given just enough information to perform its role, and no more. The US Department of Health and Human services adopts this principle in the HIPAA privacy policy, for example, which states: “protected health information should not be used or disclosed when it is not necessary to satisfy a particular purpose or carry out a function.”
There may be tradeoffs, of course, between minimizing the amount of privilege or information given to a component in a system, and other objectives such as performance or simplicity. For instance, a component may be able to do its job more efficiently if given more than the minimum amount. And it may be easier just to share more than is needed, than to extract out just the minimum required. The minimum amounts of privilege may also be hard to determine exactly, and they might change over time as the system evolves or if it is used in new ways.
Least privilege is well established in DNS through the delegation from one name server to another of just the authority it needs to handle requests within a specific subdomain. The principle of minimum disclosure has come to the forefront recently in the form of a technique called qname-minimization, which aims to improve privacy in the Domain Name System (DNS).