Re: DNSSEC indicator

Must be a lot of people who watch TV commercials and go to movies in the 
US type in URLs. I see every movie commericial ending in one. 

          Mez

Mary Ellen Zurko, STSM, IBM Lotus CTO Office       (t/l 333-6389)
Lotus/WPLC Security Strategy and Patent Innovation Architect




"Mike Beltzner" <beltzner@mozilla.com> 
Sent by: public-usable-authentication-request@w3.org
04/26/2007 08:44 AM
Please respond to
beltzner@mozilla.com


To
sthomas2@ups.com, public-usable-authentication-request@w3.org, 
public-usable-authentication@w3.org
cc

Subject
Re: DNSSEC indicator






Like page encoding, the presence/absense of DNSSEC will be interesting to 
a select few users, and should be relegated accordingly to secondary, 
diagnostic UI. The client should - when DNSSEC actually exists in the wild 
- be modified such that its presence or absence can be used to provide the 
client (not the poor user, who doesn't care about the topsy-turvy world of 
TCP/IP) with an additional criteria on which to base its security policy 
in terms of how to treat the source content. This is purely an 
implementation detail at the connection later plugging what Dick correctly 
termed a "leaky hole". 

Oh, and in answer to the question of "who still types in URLs these 
days?", it turns out that quite a lot of people do. By some metrics, as 
many as 30% of starting a task pageloads. 

cheers,
mike
 

-----Original Message-----
From: <sthomas2@ups.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:19:32 
To:<public-usable-authentication@w3.org>
Subject: RE: DNSSEC indicator


Dick is quite right. DNSSEC could indeed provide another tool in the
toolbox to make sure that the network is doing what the user really
wants. My issue, though, is elevating the DNSSEC status to a
human-visible indication. The more indicators that are displayed to a
user, the less likely the user is to pay attention to them. Research is
already showing that users are ignoring the indications that browsers
give them today. For that reason, browser designers need to be very
parsimonious in displaying security indications and focus on showing
information that is really important. Given the relative rarity of
attacks involving improper name resolutions, a DNSSEC indication would
not seem to have enough value to justify its use.

Stephen 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Hardt [mailto:dick@sxip.com] 
Sent: Thursday, 26 April 2007 8:10 AM
To: Thomas Stephen (SKD8YPG)
Cc: public-usable-authentication@w3.org
Subject: Re: DNSSEC indicator


There is unlikely to be a single silver bullet that solves *all* the 
issues. It is useful to know that the client really is connected to 
www.micros0ft.com if that is what the client wants to connect to.

DNSSEC is not going to solve social phishing attacks, but it does 
enable other technology such as CardSpace etc. to have increased 
certainty on what is going on.

-- Dick