In this paper, we revisit the performance of the QUIC connection setup and relate the design choices for fast and secure connections to common Web deployments. We analyze over 1M Web domains with 272k QUIC-enabled services and find two worrying results. First, current practices of creating, providing, and fetching Web certificates undermine reduced round trip times during the connection setup since sizes of 35% of server certificates exceed the amplification limit. Second, non-standard server implementations lead to larger amplification factors than QUIC permits, which increase even further in IP spoofing scenarios. We present guidance for all involved stakeholders to improve the situation.

When the global rollout of the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) began in 2005, it started a first-of-its-kind trial: increasing complexity of a core Internet protocol in favor of better security for the overall Internet. The necessary cryptographic key management is made particularly challenging by DNS' loosely-federated delegation substrate and unprecedented cryptographic scale. Though fundamental for current and future operational success, our community lacks a clear notion of how to empirically evaluate the process of securely changing (or transitioning) keys.In this paper, we propose two building blocks to fundamentally understand and assess key transitions. First, the anatomy of key transitions: measurable and well-defined properties of key changes; and second a novel classification model based on this anatomy to describe key transitions practices in abstract terms. Our anatomy enables the evaluation of cryptographic keys' life cycles in general, and comparison of operational practices with prescribed key management processes, e.g., RFC key rollover guidelines. The fine-grained transition anatomy is then abstracted through our classification model to characterize transitions in abstract terms which rather describe a transition's behavior than its specific features.The applicability and utility of our proposed transition anatomy and transition classes are exemplified for the global DNSSEC deployment. Specifically, we use measurements from the first 15 years of the DNSSEC rollout to detect and measure which key rollover/transitions have been used, to what degree, and what their rates of errors and warnings have been. Our results show measurable gaps between prescribed key management processes and key transitions in the wild. We also find evidence that such noncompliant transitions are inevitable in the wild.

During disasters, crisis, and emergencies the public relies on online services provided by official authorities to receive timely alerts, trustworthy information, and access to relief programs. It is therefore crucial for the authorities to reduce risks when accessing their online services. This includes catering to secure identification of service, secure resolution of name to network service, and content security and privacy as a minimum base for trustworthy communication.In this paper, we take a first look at Alerting Authorities (AA) in the US and investigate security measures related to trustworthy and secure communication. We study the domain namespace structure, DNSSEC penetration, and web certificates. We introduce an integrative threat model to better understand whether and how the online presence and services of AAs are harmed. As an illustrative example, we investigate 1,388 Alerting Authorities. We observe partial heightened security relative to the global Internet trends, yet find cause for concern as about 78% of service providers fail to deploy measures of trustworthy service provision. Our analysis shows two major shortcomings. First, how the DNS ecosystem is leveraged: about 50% of organizations do not own their dedicated domain names and are dependent on others, 55% opt for unrestricted-use namespaces, which simplifies phishing, and less than 4% of unique AA domain names are secured by DNSSEC, which can lead to DNS poisoning and possibly to certificate misissuance. Second, how Web PKI certificates are utilized: 15% of all hosts provide none or invalid certificates, thus cannot cater to confidentiality and data integrity, 64% of the hosts provide domain validation certification that lack any identity information, and shared certificates have gained on popularity, which leads to fate-sharing and can be a cause for instability. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Web application security; Domainspecific security and privacy architectures.This paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license. Authors reserve their rights to disseminate the work on their personal and corporate Web sites with the appropriate attribution.

When the global rollout of the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) began in 2005, a first-of-its-kind trial started: The complexity of a core Internet protocol was magnified in favor of better security for the overall Internet. Thereby, the scale of the loosely-federated delegation in DNS became an unprecedented cryptographic key management challenge. Though fundamental for current and future operational success, our community lacks a clear notion of how to empirically evaluate the process of securely transitioning keys.In this paper, we propose two building blocks to formally characterize and assess key transitions. First, the anatomy of key transitions, i.e., measurable and well-defined properties of key changes; and second, a novel classification model based on this anatomy for describing key transition practices in abstract terms. This abstraction allows for classifying operational behavior. We apply our proposed transition anatomy and transition classes to describe the global DNSSEC deployment. Specifically, we use measurements from the first 15 years of the DNSSEC rollout to detect and understand which key transitions have been used to what degree and which rates of errors and warnings occurred. In contrast to prior work, we consider all possible transitions and not only 1:1 key rollovers. Our results show measurable gaps between prescribed key management processes and key transitions in the wild. We also find evidence that such noncompliant transitions are needed in operations.