On 3/4/19 3:46 AM, Hal Murray via devel wrote: > Plan A is to give all the servers the certificate and private key for > time.nist.gov and do the load sharing via traditional DNS rotation. The > disadvantage with that is that there are many copies of the private key out > there. One leak and the whole system goes insecure. > > Plan B gives the servers individual certificates and names. Now we have to > do > the load sharing at the DNS level. I'm not a DNS wizard. NIST already uses > CNAMEs for this. There is no POSIX API for getting the CNAME, so we would > have to write some DNS code or find a library we like.
CNAMEs don't really help. Certificate validation uses the original name anyway. Each server would have a separate time.nist.gov certificate and key. This makes it easier to cleanup after a partial compromise (because you can revoke just the one certificate), but is otherwise the same as A. And when you have a cluster of identical machines, how likely is a partial compromise anyway? Another option is for the names to be user-visible and require the users to pick time-a.nist.gov vs time-b.nist.gov. This is useful, as you noted below, if the servers are in different locations, which NIST does have. > Plan B and C can coexist. Pick a nearby server by hand and use plan B. Or > talk to the generic KE server and it will give you IP Address and initial > cookies. -- Richard _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@ntpsec.org http://lists.ntpsec.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
