DNSCurve

Yesterday I attended a lecture by professor D.J. Bernstein, best known for his products like qmail, owner of one of the coolest domain names in the world and for his often controversial but always interesting visions.

His talk focused on why the majority of internet traffic still is not encrypted. We protect our email passwords but the 95% of other things we do is completely unprotected from a sniffer. He then narrowed it down to DNS. The problems with DNSSEC are evident and it's still a question of whether it will ever be implemented (after 15 years the design is still in flux, let alone that it's properly implemented or actually used).

On a more constructive side he presented his own solution: DNSCurve: using elliptic curve cryptography to not only sign but also encrypt DNS traffic, and do so on the fly rather than the cumbersome precomputation approach of DNSSEC. Bernstein shows that the extra cost of on the fly cryptography is, even for root servers, very minor compared to the costs of the entire system, but it does significantly reduce the administrative burden compared to DNSSEC. As usual he has made an interesting case, a worthwhile read.