How Effective is Multiple-Vantage-Point Domain Control Validation?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of multiple-vantage-point domain control validation (multiVA) in defending against BGP hijacking, using a comprehensive analysis framework applied to Let's Encrypt's deployment, revealing significant resilience improvements and optimization opportunities.

Contribution

It introduces the first analysis framework for measuring multiVA security in real-world network configurations and applies it to quantify Let's Encrypt's deployment resilience.

Findings

Let's Encrypt's multiVA offers 88% median resilience against BGP hijacks.

RPKI deployment enhances security by 15% even in partial deployment.

Further configuration optimizations can increase resilience to over 99%.

Abstract

Multiple-vantage-point domain control validation (multiVA) is an emerging defense for mitigating BGP hijacking attacks against certificate authorities. While the adoption of multiVA is on the rise, little work has quantified its effectiveness against BGP hijacks in the wild. We bridge the gap by presenting the first analysis framework that measures the security of a multiVA deployment under real-world network configurations (e.g., DNS and RPKI). Our framework accurately models the attack surface of multiVA by 1) considering the attacks on DNS nameservers involved in domain validation, 2) considering deployed practical security techniques such as RPKI, 3) performing fine-grained internet-scale analysis to compute multiVA resilience (i.e., how difficult it is to launch a BGP hijack against a domain and get a bogus certificate under multiVA). We use our framework to perform a rigorous security analysis of the multiVA deployment of Let's Encrypt, using a dataset that consists of about 1 million certificates and 31 billion DNS queries collected over four months. Our analysis shows while DNS does enlarge the attack surface of multiVA, the of Let's Encrypt's multiVA deployment still offers an 88% median resilience against BGP hijacks, a notable improvement over 76% offered by single-vantage-point validation. RPKI, even in its current state of partial deployment, effectively mitigates BGP attacks and improves the security of the deployment by 15% as compared to the case without considering RPKI. Exploring 11,000 different multiVA configurations, we find that Let's Encrypt's deployment can be further enhanced to achieve a resilience of over 99% by using a full quorum policy with only two additional vantage points in different public clouds.