This time on PING, Peter Thomassen from deSEC and Jason Goertzen from Sandbox AQ discuss their research project on post quantum cryptography in DNSSEC, funded by NLNet Labs.

Post Quantum cryptography is a response to the risk that a future quantum computer will be able to implement Shor's Algorithm -a mechanism to uncover the private key in the RSA public-private key cryptographic mechanism, as well as Diffie-Hellman and Elliptic Curve methods. This would render all existing public-private based security useless, because with knowledge of the private key by a third party, the ability to sign uniquely over things is lost: DNSSEC doesn't depend on secrecy of messages but it does depend on RSA and elliptic curve signatures. We'd lose trust in the DNSSEC protections the private key provides.

Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) addresses this by implementing methods which are not exposed to the weakness that Shor's Algorithm can exploit. But, the cost and complexity of these PQC methods rises.

Peter and Jason have been exploring implementations of some of the NIST candidate post quantum algorithms, deployed into bind9 and PowerDNS code. They've been able to use the Atlas system to test how reliably the signed contents can be seen in the DNS and have confirmed that some aspects of packet size in the DNS, and new algorithms will be a problem in deployment as things stand.

As they note, it's too soon to move this work into IETF DNS standards process but there is a continuing interest in researching the space, with other activity underway from SIDN which we'll also feature on PING.