Les Mikesell wrote:
Yes, but controlling 'who does what' only works as long as
the selected
person does what you expect. Are you following the case of the San
Francisco network admin that refused to give the password to anyone
else? This may not even be malicious (he may just think everyone else
would screw it up), but it isn't what anyone expected.
I think I saw something about it. Relying entirely on one administrator is
foolish even if he's guaranteed to never do anything malicious. There should
always be some way for someone else to access the system in case the
administrator suddenly dies for example.
>> Could you elaborate on how whois guards against malicious
system
>> administrators?
It spreads the number of things that have to be compromised to fool you.
The person who had access to copy the security certificate may not be
the same one that registers the public DNS servers.
OK, a slight improvement, but it still depends on the bank's security
routines, just like the secrecy of the secret key does.
Maybe it's a backup
operator who knows how to restore a copy elsewhere
Well, a backup copy of a secret key is just as secret as the "live" copy and
must be protected by just as rigorous routines.
>> Do you think security could be improved by having
>> browsers and other programs make whois queries automatically?
Slightly, but the DNS infrastructure probably would not handle having
every query send to an authoritative source, which is why we have the
caches that can be compromised in the first place.
So doing that manually works for you only because most people don't do it?
> Also, if it is the a system administrator at the bank, what is
to
> prevent him from just changing the real name servers?
That's visible and would leave traces in obvious places.
As I already wrote, a bank should have things set up so that copying a secret
key would also leave traces.
Björn Persson