Re: [Sks-devel] keyserver.gingerbear.net: Dynamic IP Update didn't

[David Shaw]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 01:00:42PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:

> I'm confident in this instance that your message is correct and
> reasonable.  But in combination with the recently-raised concerns about
> misbehaving peers being able to cause massive memory overconsumption for
> sks instances, and the well-known frailties of DNS, this sort of
> situation starts making me nervous.
> 
> I'd prefer to peer with well-authenticated remote hosts, and i also
> wouldn't particularly mind if the gossip traffic itself were
> cryptographically integrity-checked and/or private.
> 
> Given our discussions about wrapping HKP client-server connections in
> TLS, this suggests that it might be worthwhile to consider using TLS
> (even with a NULL cipher suite if people decide they don't care about
> privacy) for gossip connections.  Has anyone considered or implemented this?

If a misbehaving peer can cause problems with sks, a misbehaving peer
can still cause problems with sks even if the connection is
authenticated.  Not the authenticating and/or encrypting connections
is necessarily bad, but it doesn't really solve the memory problem.

I suppose it might help keep out a potential malicious gossiper, but
(and correct me if I'm wrong) aren't the gossip connections configured
manually anyway?

David