The US seizes the cryptographic material for a US based root, issues keys and certificates for the domains it wants to compromise and intercepts and modifies the traffic for targeted users. There's some additional asterisks around not getting caught and certificate transparency logs and browser reporting structure, but for many classes of devices, it will suffice to simply also hijack the domains used for requesting the transparency log or the domains used for reporting certificates that don't appear in the log.
Users who are concerned about a government like the United States can use DNSSec to prevent a threat like this by using a non-US based TLD that employs DNSSec, and by running their client in a mode that requires valid DNSSec records for their domains. Of course, such services would practically need to be located outside of the country of concern as well.
If the US is going to seize cryptographic material from CAs, they've probably got no problem ordering US based domain registries to do their bidding either. If it's Verisign registry, they can use the Verisign CA too, and it's only one company to compel.
If all else fails, ICANN runs the root servers more or less, and is based in the US, and subject to being compelled to make bad signatues of tld glue records.
First off, ICANN doesn't run the root servers. ICANN operates 1 root server identity,l-root.root-servers.net. The others are run by different organizations.
Secondly, the root server operators have no control over the cryptography. They get a zone file and they serve it.
ICANN only runs the key generation ceremony which is scripted to prevent any single entity from tampering with the keys. ZSKs are generated a few months in advance and used by Verisign (the root zone maintainer) to sign the root zone. No one gets to see the private part of the KSK. So there is no way to compel ICANN to produce bad signatures.
> ICANN only runs the key generation ceremony which is scripted to prevent any single entity from tampering with the keys. ZSKs are generated a few months in advance and used by Verisign (the root zone maintainer) to sign the root zone. No one gets to see the private part of the KSK. So there is no way to compel ICANN to produce bad signatures.
Ok, well back to compelling Verisign. Certainly they are able to sign zones, although that authority flows from ICANN.
> Finally, glue records aren't signed!
If glue records aren't signed, then why wouldn't an adversary simply modify the glue records to omit the DNSSEC content? Maybe you're making a technical argument that the whole root zone is signed, not its individual components?
For a state like the US, with it's laws and history on surveillance. I assume PKI has been compromised.
I don't check or audit my CA's and don't think most people do either. Wouldn't be surprised if more than one of these has been compromised in some fashion already. It only takes one and there's plenty to target.
The next thing you'd need is a mitm attack and again that's entirely possible for a nation state to pull off at scale.
> I don't check or audit my CA's and don't think most people do either.
The people responsible for running the root stores do. And when CAs screw up, they are nuked from orbit--this has happened a few times. And they can be proactive: when Kazakhstan announced they would require all TLS connections to be MITM'd, the browsers promptly added the MITM certificate to the root store with the explicit distrust bit set, meaning that the resulting certificate error can't be clicked through, effectively breaking the internet if you tried to use that for MITM (which put the kibosh on that plan immediately).
And for another thing, I wouldn't trust the people who run the nameservers any more intrinsically than CAs. After all, the TLD that runs most of the commercial internet (.com) is run by a company that had problems when it ran a CA. There's no way to route around an untrustworthy TLD operator, and it needs to be recalled that many TLDs are literally run by state governments. And several of those governments believe the privacy of their citizens to be a bug, not a feature; giving them a more prominent role in securing privacy is not a good thing.
Everybody has to do business somewhere. Nobody can prevent the government in whose territory they do business from compromising them. The question is whether you can be compromised by all governments (TLS) or just your government (TLS+DNSSec).
> The people responsible for running the root stores do. And when CAs screw up, they are nuked from orbit--this has happened a few times
The CAs that got the boot were detected because they issued certificates that were obviously invalid, for example for domains like example.com (Symantec), test.com (Certinomis), or domains that didn't even exist (Camerfirma).
A CA that issues an unauthorized certificate for some random domain won't be detected unless that domain's owner is monitoring CT because no one else knows if the certificate is authorized or not.
So please do monitor CT for your domains and don't just rely on root stores and security researchers to do so.
Every single certificate issued by a WebPKI CA (ie: a CA whose certificates are accepted by Google or Mozilla's root programs) is logged in a globally auditable tamper-proof log. You can stand up an instance of that log, or monitor any of the existing logs yourself. You're not relying on laws to surveil the WebPKI CAs, but rather mathematics.
A log to secure TLS which clients typically obtain over a TLS connection and whose violations they report over a TLS connection. It's a circular dependency.
CT provides a guarantee like: "hopefully one of those devices will eventually connect to a non-compromised network and report the prior compromise". By observing the lack of such reports, we can be reasonably confident compromises of size N>millions are not happening, but it's difficult to reason about what compromises may be happening at small N.
Users who are concerned about a government like the United States can use DNSSec to prevent a threat like this by using a non-US based TLD that employs DNSSec, and by running their client in a mode that requires valid DNSSec records for their domains. Of course, such services would practically need to be located outside of the country of concern as well.