[HN Gopher] NSA Recommends How Enterprises Can Securely Adopt En...
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       NSA Recommends How Enterprises Can Securely Adopt Encrypted DNS
        
       Author : theBashShell
       Score  : 65 points
       Date   : 2021-01-16 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nsa.gov)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nsa.gov)
        
       | nimbius wrote:
       | >NSA recommends that an enterprise network's DNS traffic,
       | encrypted or not, be sent only to the designated enterprise DNS
       | resolver.
       | 
       | its either a slow day at the NSA or federal agencies have become
       | so intellectually bankrupted by the cloud that they consider
       | proclamations of the fundamentals of DNS and networking to be
       | some sort of sage wisdom.
        
         | blondin wrote:
         | unless i am reading this wrong, they are not saying don't send
         | your requests to Cloudfare, Apple, etc. i am not entirely privy
         | to all this, but aren't they entreprise grade DNS resolvers?
        
           | Spooky23 wrote:
           | They are high quality services, not controlled by the
           | company.
           | 
           | It's pretty obvious that allowing unloggable DNS traffic in
           | an enterprise is a bad idea. It makes ex filtration trivial.
        
             | salawat wrote:
             | Exfiltration already is trivial DNS or not. Just admit that
             | you want to be able to eavesdrop on all activity
             | whatsoever.
             | 
             | What, you think that anyone looking to get something out
             | undetected isn't using raw IP's?
        
               | Spooky23 wrote:
               | On my network? Absolutely, ability to inspect packets is
               | absolutely essential. On a public network? Different
               | story.
               | 
               | I've personally been engaged in incident response and in
               | many scenarios DNS is a control mechanism for malware, or
               | uses it for various purposes. It's often a key piece of
               | evidence for reconstruction of an incident.
               | 
               | Raw IPs can be used as well, but that doesn't negate my
               | point.
        
               | 0xquad wrote:
               | >Raw IPs can be used as well, but that doesn't negate my
               | point.
               | 
               | And in fact if you have enterprise-wide visibility on DNS
               | requests, you have the opportunity to detect the use of
               | an IP that was not returned in a request. Making it
               | immediately suspect.
        
         | freeone3000 wrote:
         | Somebody has to recommend the basic stuff, otherwise it's just
         | rumor. This is a topical addition to a list of DNS
         | recommendations.
        
         | rasengan wrote:
         | Specifically, they are saying that in a home/personal
         | environment, it makes sense to use DoH with a public resolver
         | like cloudflare, but in enterprise, you will not be able to
         | maintain tight control over internal use as browsers role out
         | with DoH by default unless you block those public resolvers and
         | enforce policy to use the enterprise resolver. It doesn't
         | matter unless you care about these tight controls though even
         | in enterprise.
        
           | StreamBright wrote:
           | It is going to be super hard to block DoH since it is
           | indistinguishable from normal HTTPS traffic. If you MITM the
           | HTTPS connection the browser can detect that and refuse to
           | use the connection. Many companies are in this situation that
           | MITMing HTTPS is not working very well. I think Google
           | enforces HSTS[1]. Not sure how that works with DOH. I also
           | think that we need browsers that do not have any other means
           | of DNS resolution than the good old operating system wide
           | /etc/resolv.conf (or similar). I am not going to fight with
           | Google if I have the right to have my own DNS server or not.
           | They are taking the open internet inch by inch. This is the
           | last drop.
           | 
           | 1.
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security
        
             | rasengan wrote:
             | That's a good point -- I wasn't really thinking about the
             | practicability since it's not something I had much interest
             | in. That said, I guess either blackholing the DNS so it
             | can't initially be resolved, or even figuring out any and
             | all IP addresses it resolves to and blackholing those IPs
             | would be a start.
             | 
             | I agree, however, that it should be possible to run your
             | own _______. That's what the internet was meant to be.
        
             | XorNot wrote:
             | At an enterprise level the browser configuration is
             | controlled by the IT department. Your MITM CA certificate
             | is going to be forced into the trusted list everywhere.
        
         | 0xquad wrote:
         | They are responding to the very recent emergence of
         | applications (like Firefox) that (optionally) use their own
         | encrypted DNS, thus bypassing the enterprise's ability to apply
         | security policy based on DNS. (Visibility on DNS is also useful
         | to help detect some malware.) I'll allow it.
        
         | TedDoesntTalk wrote:
         | Now you can point to that and say "We use the best DNS
         | practices as recommended by the NSA."
        
         | belorn wrote:
         | I read that to mean: Do not allow doh to tunnel all your dns
         | traffic out to cloudflare regardless of the promise of
         | encryption. Send it only to the designated enterprise DNS
         | resolver, ie the one under control by the enterprise.
         | 
         | All other DNS resolvers should be disabled and blocked, ie all
         | those public dns resolvers.
        
           | salawat wrote:
           | In other words "MitM everything".
           | 
           | It gets so tiresome. I used to think the people who called
           | out tyranny everywhere were just nuts, but it never ceases to
           | amaze that everything nowadays keeps going "centralize and
           | control".
        
             | wmf wrote:
             | Sending your DNS queries to a resolver that you control is
             | hardly MITM. In this case "you" is a company.
        
               | userbinator wrote:
               | ...and in the case of people using DNS-based adblocking
               | and such, "you" is... yourself.
        
               | StreamBright wrote:
               | What he means is that NSA and related has the ability to
               | MITM HTTPS while another actors do not, probably.
        
             | VWWHFSfQ wrote:
             | No you're misunderstanding what the recommendation is. If a
             | company runs their own DoH or even regular DNS or AD
             | resolvers, then the company's client computers (the laptops
             | their employees take home) should not be querying any old
             | resolver hard-coded in their web browser (Firefox,
             | CloudFlare) for internal company domain addresses. That's
             | literally all this is saying. It's good corporate IT policy
             | anyway and it's only being reiterated with DoH.
        
             | grayfaced wrote:
             | In light of SolarWinds hack, I think it's fair to say that
             | DoH is a real threat. Putting that volume of machines under
             | the control of a single "trusted" network provider is very
             | bad idea.
        
         | jorblumesea wrote:
         | Security recommendations aren't supposed to be brilliant
         | insights. They're just best practices.
        
           | 737min wrote:
           | Exactly right. Many security problems are due to forgoing the
           | simple things in favor of exotic.
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-16 23:00 UTC)