Re: Leveraging trust

[Edward Lewis <lewis@tislabs.com>]

At 7:18 PM -0500 3/27/02, Keith Moore wrote:
>if we want the DNS root to hold together, we need to place as little
>strain on it as possible.  giving the root additional responsibility
>doesn't strike me as a good way to do this.

Does this mean that we shouldn't sign the root zone?  (This may sound like
a sarcastic question, but I don't mean it that way.  I am trying to
understand the limits of "as little ... as possible.")

In one of the older DNSSEC documents, now RFC 2065, is the following passage:
"A resolver should keep track of the number of successive secure zones
traversed from a starting point to any secure zone it can reach.  In
general, the lower such a distance number is, the greater the
confidence in the data."

Between that and the comments on the root, would it be acceptable to rely
on a set of SLDs (such as we\'ll-sign-your-data.com) as anchors of "trust?"
Should we re-instrument resolvers of DNS to know just how many "leaps of
faith" were made in evaluating the integrity of a piece of data?

It seems to me that the concept of hierarchy gives us a scaleable and
deterministic framework at the cost of creating a breaking point (the
root).  One of the other effects is that an open protocol based on
hierarchy seems to engender "market-dominate" entities because it seems
that there is ususally one best player in the game and folks want the best
player as their service provider.

Does this mean that a trust system based upon hierarchy is doomed?  Is
there an alternative framework that will allow trust to be leveraged, be
scaleable, yet not suffer from choke points?  By leveraged, I mean the
ability to start at trusting some point and being able to travel to a lot
of other points in a trustworthy way.  By scaleable, I mean something that
is easily understood and simple enough to function in a large population of
independent instances.  An example of a choke point is an entity that
undermines the faith of the community to an extent that this single
handedly tears the framework down.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Edward Lewis                                                NAI Labs
Phone: +1 443-259-2352                      Email: lewis@tislabs.com

Opinions expressed are property of my evil twin, not my employer.