Subject: RE: whois and zone enumeration

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 19:53:31 -0700

> what we have here is a divergence of vision.  security is not 
> obscurity, and obscurity is not an intended feature of either 
> "dns classic" or any extension ever made to dns.

As a security professional who is engaged as such I can assure
you that it is a very bad idea to remove security controls 
from an existing system unless you understand their effect.

The fact that a control is unintended or is rejected on 
ideological grounds does not mean that it can be dispensed
with. I am currently dealling with the consequences of
an industry abandoning certain controls that were present
in the ATM systems but are not present on the Internet.
As a result I spend a great deal of time talking to
law enforcement.

Removing imperfect security controls without replacing them
is one of the main ways that security protocols fail in 
practice.

Before simply repeating the standard security dogmas that you 
have heard, please understand that they have never been considered
absolute maxims in the security world and those who have tried
to apply them have mostly produced systems that failed.

'Security through obscurity is false security' has been a discredited 
dogma in the security world since it was used to delay the 
introduction of shaddow passwords in UNIX for about three years.
It took the arrival of crack to change minds there.

'End to End security' and 'bad security is worse than no
security' are also considered obsolete in the real security 
world. 

The common sense ideas that preceded the dogmas are still 
generally accepted. But you are advancing a dogmatic interpretation
that is rejected by the field. It certainly has no place in a
security design argument.

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 15:12:20 +0200

On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 07:53:31PM -0700,
 Hallam-Baker, Phillip <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 46 lines which said:

> 'Security through obscurity is false security' has been a
> discredited dogma in the security world

Because many people misunderstood it: they thought it meaned "Security
through obscurity is false security and thefore everything should be
published immediately" while it actually means "Security through
obscurity is false security and therefore your security should not
disappear completely when the system is known" (defence in depth: I do
not assume that zone enumeration is impossible, I have other
protections, but it does not mean I post the zone file on an anonymous
FTP server).