confidentiality and transfers

["Scott Rose" <scottr@antd.nist.gov>]

Some points I noticed when going over the requirements draft and the notes of the Minn meeting -

 

1.  Since confidentiality is a key issue, and the provisioning registry protocol is built upon other protocols, it would be wise to choose something that provides confidentiality at the transport layer (TLS or another protocol).  If the unique "registry handle" is used as the check to make modifications to a domain registration, the generation and transmission of that handle must be secured from evedroppers.  I use the term "confidentiality" to mean "encryption of messages in transit", since "privacy" means different things to different people and it is hard to determine what "we need privacy" means today.

 

2.  The Minn meeting also pointed out the need for authentication.  In the requirements doc, there is no mention of any authentication needed for Object Transfer between registrars  (Section 3.7).  Is this something that might be needed, or is the posession of the unique registration handle (suposedly supplied by the registrant of the domain name) enough?  It might be necessary to have an authentication of a registrar by another registrar before any objects are transferred.  Otherwise, an attacker that has aquired the handle for a domain registration could assume control of it by impersonating another registrar and requesting the domain to be transferred to the attacker.

 

 

Is this last observation valid?  Would registrars need to authenticate themselves before requesting an object transfer? 

 

Scott

 

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Scott Rose
Advanced Network Technologies Division
NIST

 

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