RHINE: Robust and High-performance Internet Naming with E2E Authenticity

The variety and severity of recent DNS-based attacks under- score the importance of a secure naming system. Although DNSSEC provides data authenticity in theory, practical deployments unfortunately are fragile, costly, and typically lacks end-to-end (E2E) guarantees. This motivates us to rethink authentication in DNS fundamentally and introduce RHINE, a secure-by-design Internet naming system.

RHINE offloads the authentication of zone delegation to an end-entity PKI and tames the operational complexity in an offline manner, allowing the efficient E2E authentication of zone data during online name resolution. With a novel logging mechanism, Delegation Transparency, RHINE achieves a highly robust trust model that can tolerate the compromise of all but one trusted entities and, for the first time, counters threats from superordinate zones. We formally verify RHINE's security properties using the Tamarin prover. We also demonstrate its practicality and performance advantages with a prototype implementation.