appendix-key-distro-choice.md

Key Distribution: DNS or ...?

Summary

This document summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of distributing user keys in DNS and HTTP.

Keys in DNS

If a sender wished to e-mail alice@example.com, the sender would query the DNS of the recipient's provider with a DNS query something like the form encrypt.alice._uee.example.com which would return the recipient's public key, or NXDOMAIN if there was no public key.

When verifying a signature, the MUA would look up sign.alice._uee.example.com which would return the signing key.

Because we want to be able to support publication of multiple concurrent signing keys (to allow for smooth key transitions) older/deprecated keys can also be fetched at:

• 1.sign.alice._uee.example.com
• 2.sign.alice._uee.example.com
• ... (decimal prefixes)

Once N.sign.alice._uee.example.com returns NXDOMAIN, there are no more keys published.

DNS has a well understood deployment model and a well understood caching model. It is lightweight and fast, and can be secured with DNSSEC. It is capable of redundancy.

Additionally, DNSSEC provides protection against blocking. NSEC and NSEC3 records prevent an adversary from blocking access to a server, and users being unsure if that service exists.

However, there are scenarios where DNS is not confidential. If an adversary watches the network traffic of a sender (whether the sender is an end-user or a provider) they will be able to observe a DNS request for a specific recipient in the recipient's domain. Even when the sender uses DNSSEC, the problem remains because DNSSEC queries provide Authenticity and Integrity, but not Confidentiality.
This leaks the specific recipient, whereas in a mail exchange that takes place inside an TLS tunnel, no such leak takes place.

Additionally, there are a number of providers (companies, normal domain administrators included) who outsource their e-mail to a third party - but still manage their own DNS. They enter MX records for the mail provider - but in a DNS-deployment model they would have to enter public keys themselves or set up a potentially complicated delegated DNS tree. This delegated subtree is not supported by many DNS providers and would be another engineering effort required.

Keys in HTTPS

If a sender wished to email alice@example.com the sender would perform a DNS(SEC) query to the recipient's domain, looking up a SRV record for _uee._tcp.example.com. If the result is NXDOMAIN, then the recipient does not support UEE. However if the recipient does support UEE, the response will be a list of servers and ports.

Using those servers and ports (taking keys.example.com and port 443 as an example) the sender will issue a HTTP request, secured using TLS, to a URI of the form https://keys.example.com/com/example/%40/alice/encrypt. That response makes use of standard HTTP response codes. A 200 OK will include recipient's public key. A 404 Not Found would indicate a user does not have a public key, and encryption should not be performed.

When verifying a signature, the MUA does the same SRV lookup, and then requests https://keys.example.com/com/example/%40/bob/sign For prior signing keys:

• https://keys.example.com/com/example/%40/bob/sign.1
• https://keys.example.com/com/example/%40/bob/sign.2
• ... (decimal suffixes)

Once .../sign.N returns a 404, there are no more keys published.

Deploying HTTPS servers as the targets of SRV records is a well understood deployment model, and organizations have a solid understanding of deploying webservers, maintaining them, making them redundant, enabling caching, and distributing data using Content Distribution Networks. Fetching HTTPS content is a common task, it is reasonably fast and lightweight.

An adversary can block access to the key distribution servers. But because the keyservers are discovered over DNSSEC, they are protected against an attack where the adversary blocks access to the key distribution servers in an attempt to prevent a user from knowing a provider uses UEE. The user is certain the provider supports UEE, and can conclude that the servers are either nonfunctioning or blocked.

When directly examining the HTTPS mechanism in comparison to the confidentiality leaks in the DNS mechanism, HTTPS fares much better. In this scenario, the network observer is able to learn that the sender is discovering a key for a user at the recipient's provider, but not the individual user(s) who will receive the mail.

The recipient's provider is also disclosed; however, because the sender's provider is about to make a connection to it in the upcoming SMTP connection - so this leak is no worse than what we have currently IF we assume the attacker can monitor both the sender and the sender's provider. If the attacker is only able to monitor the sender, then this does leak information. Tooling around end-user mail clients should work to mitigate this risk: key caching, keyring syncing (perhaps using the sender's provider), and proxied key lookups come to mind.

The HTTPS key discovery mechanism lends itself well to current web architecture and services. Organizations are capable of setting DNS SRV records once, and managing individual user changes is less of a headache. It is relatively easy to deploy static HTTP servers with standard filesystem-permissions for scoping key management. Users could be given direct write access to their own keys, and one key distribution hub could host key publication for many domains, potentially giving each domain admin privileges over their subdirectories.

Conclusion

DNS and HTTPS-based Key Distribution systems both allow hierarchical data, redundancy models, and caching. They can both provide some degree of authenticity through public root authorities.

However, DNS-Based key distribution systems leak more information relative to HTTPS-based key lookups. Additionally, managing DNS entries for each user of a service does not lend itself to the current sale and management of DNS today.

HTTPS-Based key distribution systems leak less information comparitively, and does not suffer the same management issues.