[Cryptography] DNSSEC = completely unnecessary?

[Nico Williams]

On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 11:33:37PM -0500, Greg wrote:
> In all my readings on it I kept walking away thinking that I
> understood its purpose, but I'd then come back at myself with the same
> question: what does it give us over HTTPS?

Answer: Something closer to a real PKI with one root and much less
complexity than PKIX.  And if you also use the TLS server PKI then you
get two factors for authenticating servers to users.

> Selected quotes:
> 
> Unfortunately, DNSSEC isn't actually providing additional security
> against a genuine MITM attack: SSL/TLS is still the weak link in the
> chain when DNSSEC is used!

Not so; see DANE [RFC6698].

> What say you list? To me, the DNSSEC thing seems like it might be
> mostly a waste of a bunch of people's time.

DNSSEC has issues (e.g., slow deployment, bandwidth-amplification), but
it is not a waste of time, and together with DANE, DNSSEC provides
robust security (or can, assuming other things are done right, like
selection of public key algorithms and key sizes).

Nico
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