Under the Hood of DANE Mismanagement in SMTP

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Presented at USENIX Security 2022 by

The DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) is an Internet security protocol that enables a TLS connection without relying on trusted third parties like CAs by introducing a new DNS record type, TLSA. DANE leverages DNSSEC PKI to provide the integrity and authenticity of TLSA records. As DANE can solve security challenges in SMTP, such as STARTTLS downgrade attacks and receiver authentication, it has been increasingly deployed surpassing more than 1 M domains with SMTP servers that have TLSA records. A recent study, however, reported that there are prevalent misconfigurations on DANE SMTP servers, which hinders DANE from being proliferated.