Even if you hate dnssec (and there are many legit criticisms to make) i think it does make sense for CA's to validate it if its there. Its low effort on the CA side, and there isn't really very much downside if its already active.
DNSSEC is one of very few topics where voices I respect on security seem completely opposed (WebPKI depends on DNS vs. DNS security does not matter). Is there any literature that demonstrates deep understanding of both arguments? Why are they (DNSSEC + WebPKI) never considered complimentary?
From my perspective, the challenge with DNSSEC is that it just doesn't have a very good cost/benefit ratio. Once the WebPKI exists, "critical path" use of DNSSEC only offers modest value. Now, obviously, this article is about requiring CAs to check DNSSEC, which is out of the critical path and of some value, but it's not clear to me it's of enough value to get people to actually roll out DNSSEC.
I'll share a couple of thoughts, but do read EKR's blog first:
- Web PKI is inherently insecure and can't be fixed on its own. The root problem is that the CAs we "trust" can issue certificates without technical controls. The best we can do is ask them to be nice and force them provide a degree of (certificate) transparency to enable monitoring. This is still being worked on. [3]
- The (very, very) big advantage of Web PKI is that it operates online and supports handshake negotiation. As a result, iteration can happen quickly if people are motivated. A few large players can get together and effect a big change (e.g., X25519MLKEM768). DNSSEC was designed for offline operation and lacks negotiation, which means that everyone has to agree before changes can happen. Example: Kipp Hickman created SSL and Web PKI in 3 months, by himself [1]. DNSSEC took years and years.
- DNSSEC could have been fixed, but Web PKI was "good enough" and the remaining problem wasn't sufficiently critical.
- A few big corporations control this space, and they chose Web PKI.
- A humongous amount of resources has been spent on iterating and improving Web PKI in the last 30 years. So many people configuring certificates, breaking stuff, certificates expiring... we've wasted so much of our collective lives. There is a parallel universe in which encryption keys sit in DNS and, in it, no one has to care about certificate rotation.
- DNSSEC can't ever work end-to-end because of DNS ossification. End-user software (e.g., browsers) can't reliably obtain any new DNS resource records, be it DANE or SVCB/HTTPS.
- The one remaining realistic use for DNSSEC is to bootstrap Web PKI and, possibly, secure server-to-server communication. This is happening, now that CAs are required to validate DNSSEC. This one changes finally makes it possible to configure strong cryptographic validation before certificate issuance. [2]
You are going to complain that the key sizes are too small despite the guidelines being updated a long time ago. Then you will argue adoption of larger keys sizes is to low. Then you will argue that we should just not sign domain name authority delegation records at all (i.e. DNSSEC) and that we should abandon shoring up authenticated DNS because there is no adoption.
You have any cryptographers that are satisfied with unauthenticated name server checks?
You got a point: 1k isn't great and of course mainstream cryptographers will advocate for higher. That doesn't change that it's still acceptable within the existing security model nor that better alternatives are available. The cryptographic strength of DNSSEC isn't a limiting factor that fatally dooms the whole project. We have to upgrade the crypto used in large-scale infrastructure all the time!
And yes, uptake of better crypto is poor but I find chicken-and-egg arguments disingenuous when coming from someone who zealously advocates to make it worse. Furthermore, your alternative is no signing of DNS records. Find me a cryptographer who thinks no PKI is a better alternative. I know DJB griped about DNSSEC when proposing DNSCurve, which protects the privacy of the payload but not the intergrity of the payload.
I enabled DNSSEC a couple of years ago on my self hosted powerdns setup. I sign the zone locally, than build docker containers via SSH on the target nodes.
I made a mistake once and signed with wrong keys which then broke DANE. It‘s good to validate your DNSSEC (and DANE, CAA etc.) setup through external monitoring.
In case the post is fuzzy: what's changed is that as of March 2026, CAs are required to validate DNSSEC if it's enabled when doing DCV or CAA. Previously, it was technically the case that a CA could ignore DNSSEC if you had it set up on your domains, though LetsEncrypt has (as I understand it) been checking DNSSEC pretty much this whole time.
If you own and host your own domain, it's probably very easy to have your DNS provider enable DNSSEC for you, maybe just a button click. They'd sure like you to do that, because DNSSEC is itself quite complicated, and once you press that button it's much less likely that you're going to leave your provider. DNSSEC mistakes take your entire domain off the Internet, as if it had never existed.
There's a research project, started at KU Leuven, that attempts an unbiased "top N" list of most popular domains; it's called the Tranco List. For the last year or so, I've monitored the top 1000 domains on the Tranco list to see which have DNSSEC enabled. You can see that here:
First, DNSSEC penetration in the top 1000 is single digits % (dropping sharply, down to 2%, as you scope down to the top 100).
Second, in a year of monitoring and recording every change in DNSSEC state on every domain in this list, I've seen just three Tranco Top 1000 domains change their DNSSEC state, and one of those changes was Canva disabling DNSSEC. (I think, as of a few weeks ago, they've re-enabled it again). Think about that: 1000 very popular domains, and just 0.3% of them thought even a second about DNSSEC.
That’s a fun list, the only hits in the top 100 are actually Cloudflare, for whom automatic DNSSEC is a feature, and would be a bad look not to dogfood it.
(I did a lot of the work of shipping that product in a past life. We had to fight the protocol and sometimes the implementers to beat it into something deployable. I am proud of that work from a technical point of view, but I agree DNSSEC adds little systemic value and haven’t thought about it since moving on from that project almost 10 years ago. It doesn’t look like DNSSEC itself has changed since, either.)
Then a few government sites, which have mandated it. The first hit after those is around #150.
Largely, DNS integrity has been addressed by making it harder to spoof dns responses without visibility.
Resolvers have put in the effort to use most of the range of source ports and all of the range of request ids, as well as mixed caps, so predicting queries is difficult and blind spoofing requires an unreasonable number of packets.
Additionally, commercial DNS services tend to be well connected anycast. This means most queries can be served with a very low round trip time; reducing the spoofing window. Additionally, there's less opportunity to observe requests as they traverse fewer networks and less distance.
Generally, traffic has moved to certificate authenticated protocols. CAs are required to verify domain control from multiple locations, so an attacker asserting domain control would need to do so for the victim as well as multiple other locations in order to get a certificate issued.
Further; if we assume you plan to assert domain control by taking over or MITMing the IP of a DNS server, it seems likely you could do the same for the IP of an application server. DNSSEC doesn't help very much in that case. (DNSSEC with DANE could help in that case, but to a first approximation, nothing supports that, and there doesn't appear to be any movement towards it)
If an attacker owns a resolver DNSSEC stops mattering too; from the resolver to the stub-resolver, the protocol collapses down to a single "yes we did DNSSEC" bit in the header.
The bigger thing here is DoH, which has very real penetration, and works for zones that don't do anything to opt-in. That's what a good design looks like: it just works without uninvolved people having to do extra stuff.
I think DNSSEC supporters, what few of them are left, are really deep into cope about what transport security is doing to the the rationale for DNSSEC deployment. There's nothing about DoH that makes it complicated to speak it to an authority server. The only reason I can see that we're not going to get that is that multi-perspective kills the value proposition of even doing that much.
> There's nothing about DoH that makes it complicated to speak it to an authority server.
There’s a problem with HTTPS, though. HTTPS uses URLs that use WebPKI to tie the URL to the certificate validation algorithm. Which means you need WebPKI certificates, which needs DNS. Chicken, meet egg.
Maybe there could be a new URL scheme that doesn’t need WebPKI. It could be spelled like:
https_explicit:[key material]//host.name/path
or maybe something slightly crazy and even somewhat backwards compatible if the CA/browser people wouldn’t blow a fuse:
explicit_key.net would be some appropriate reserved domain, and some neutral party (ICANN?) could actually register it, expose the appropriate A records and, using a trusted and name-constrained intermediate CA, issue actual certificates that allow existing browsers to validate the key material in the domain name.
It seems pretty clear to me that the industry, and particularly the slice of the industry that operates large, important sites and staffs big security teams, doesn't believe this is a meaningful problem at all.
The fact that it's 2026 and the CAs are only now getting around to requiring any CA to take DNSSEC, which has in its current form been operational for well over a decade, makes you take DNSSEC more seriously?
Why dodge the question? Clearly they care today, and I live in today.
If we're doing to defer to industry, does only the opinion of website operators matter, or do browsers and CAs matter too? Browsers and CAs tend to be pretty important and staff big security teams too.
Barely 5% of the internet have DNSSEC signed zones and a big chunk of that are handled by CDN's that do the signing automagically for the domain owner as they also host SOA DNS. Mandating DNSSEC would require years of planning and warning those that have not yet set it up and in my opinion DNSSEC tooling should become a better first class citizen in all of the authoritative DNS daemons. as in there should be so many levels of error handling and validation that it would be next to impossible for anyone to break their zones.
So do we wait for all the stragglers? Wait for the top 500 or top 2500 to make it mandatory? Who takes financial responsibility for those that fell through the cracks?
No CA requires DNSSEC. Obviously they can't: almost nothing is signed. The only change "today" is that technically CAs are now required to honor DNSSEC, where they weren't before.
I think the fact they don't require it shows it's moribund. If cert providers (or google with their big stick of chrome) specified it is required to have DNSSEC to get a certificate, everyone would jump in line and set it up because there'd be no other choice.
I agree that not checking it all is an even worse signal. I'm just saying the fact that this is officially enforced only in 2026 is itself a bad signal. At any rate, the CAs you'd have worked with were enforcing DNSSEC this whole time.
I agree that it's relatively easy for CAs to validate DNSSEC. I think the fact that they weren't technically required to, despite the sole remaining use case for DNSSEC being to protect against misissuance, is a pretty strong indicator of how cooked DNSSEC is.
Huh? They really don't. It's actually kind of unfortunate that browsers don't have uniform policies about what certificates they accept, but for obvious reasons each browser wants to make their own decision.
Big sites don't have the same concerns as individual end users, in this case specifically about centralized servers surveilling DNS queries.
DNSSEC zone signing lets one resolve records without having to directly go through trusted (ie centralizing) nameservers. (If you run your own recursive resolver this just changes the set of trusted servers to the zones' servers).
I've made this argument in the context of your poo-pooing DNSSEC before, and I don't expect you to be receptive to it this time. Rather I just really wish I could get around to writing code to demonstrate what I mean.
> If you own and host your own domain, it's probably very easy to have your DNS provider enable DNSSEC for you
It isn't that easy on AWS.
It also generally is not that easy if your domain registrar is not the same as your dns host, because it involves both parties. And some registrers don't have APIs for automatic certificate rotation, so you have to manually rotate the certs periodically.
I have a setup with separated dns and domain since 2021. Using a CSK with unlimited lifetime, I never had to rotate. And could easily also migrate both parts (having a copy of the key material)
Register only has public material
The master is bind9, and any semi-trusted provider can be used as slave/redundency/cdn getting zonetransfers including the RRsigs
I'm sure you can find several of those using the search bar. The argument has gotten a lot grimmer since 2015 --- DNSSEC lost deployment in North America over the last couple years. It didn't simply plateau off and stop growing: people have started turning it off. That corresponds with the success of CT in the WebPKI, with multi-perspective lookup, with the failure of DANE stapling in tls-wg, and with domain hijacking through registrar fixing.
> By assigning Decentralized Identifiers (like did:tdw or SSH-key DIDs) to individual time servers and managing their state with Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI), we can completely bypass the TLS chicken-and-egg problem where a client needs the correct time to validate a server's certificate.
> To future-proof such a protocol, we can replace heavy certificate chains with stateless hash-based signatures (SPHINCS+, XMSS^MT) paired with lightweight zkSNARKs. If a node is compromised, its identity can be instantly revoked and globally broadcast via Merkle Tree Certificates and DID micro-ledgers, entirely removing DNS from the security dependency chain.
The system described there I think could replace NTP NTS, DNS, DNSSEC, and maybe CA PKI revocation;
PQ with Merkle Tree certificates
Was wondering how long it'd take you to come in and trash talk DNSSEC. And now with added FUD ("and once you press that button it's much less likely that you're going to leave your provider").
This is a topic I obviously pay a lot of attention to. Wouldn't it be weirder if I came here with a different take? What do you expect?
I don't think I'm out on a limb suggesting that random small domains should not enable DNSSEC. There's basically zero upside to it for them. I think there's basically never a good argument to enable it, but at least large, heavily targeted sites have a colorable argument.
Actually I think it probably is suspicious to have the exact same opinion after studying something over a long period of time. My opinions are more likely to remain consistent, rather than growing more nuanced or sophisticated, if all I've done is trot out the same responses over a longer period of time.
I've struggled to think of an especially unexamined example because after all they tend to sit out of conscious recall, I think the best I can do is probably that my favourite comic book character is Miracleman's daughter, Winter Moran. That's a consistent belief I've held for decades, I haven't spent a great deal of time thinking about it, but it's not entirely satisfactory and probably there is some introduced nuance, particularly when I re-examined the contrast between what Winter says about the humans to her father and what her step-sister Mist later says about them to her (human) mother because I was writing an essay during lockdown.
It would make them more secure and less vulnerable to attacks. But lazy sysadmins and large providers are too scared to do anything, in no small part due to your ... incorrect arguments against it.
No it wouldn't? How exactly would it make them more secure? It makes availability drastically more precarious and defends against a rare, exotic attack none of them actually face and which in the main is conducted by state-level adversaries for whom DNSSEC is literally a key escrow system. People are not thinking this through.
That entire post is that you should enable DNSSEC because it's "more secure", and there are no reasons not to.
"More secure" begs the question "against what?", which the blog post doesn't seem to want to go into. Maybe it's secure from hidden tigers.
My favourite DNSSEC "lolwut" is about how people argue that it's something "NIST recommends", whilst at the same time the most recent major DNSSEC outage was......... time.nist.gov! (https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html)
You keep waving this blog post from 2015 at me. Not only have we discussed it before, but it was a top-level HN post with 79 comments, many of them from me.
Please don't stealth-edit your posts after I respond to them. If you need to edit, just leave a little note in your comment that you edited it.
Yes it did hit HN and you just said, "I stand by what I wrote." and then complain about buggy implementations and downtime connected to DNSSEC. As if that isn't true for all technologies, let alone /insecure/ DNS. DNS is connected to a lot of downtime because it undergirds the whole internet. Making the distributed database that delegates domain authority cryptographically secure makes everything above it more secure too.
I rebutted your arguments point-by-point. You don't update your blog post to reflect those arguments nor recent developments, like larger key sizes.
So: I wrote a blog post in January of 2015, and 7 months later you wrote a blog post responding to it in August of 2015, and 10 years later you're still angry that I didn't update my blog post to point to the post that you wrote?
I write things people disagree with all the time. I can't recall ever having been mad that people didn't cite me for things we disagree about. Should I have expected all the people who hated coding agents to update their articles when I wrote "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts"? I didn't realize I was supposed to be complaining about that.
I advocate for DNSSEC in my personal life and you happen to jump on every DNSSEC HN submission and repeat your claims. So I post a link to my article debunking them. You won't engage in the substantive points here but insist that you have in the past and that you stand by your post. So I suggest your update your post to address my critiques.
I'm frustrated that you seem to blow me off and insult me when I try to engage in good faith discussion, but I'm not angry at you. I just ran into this post while procrastinating at work and here we are, in the same loop.
I think we are both trying to make the internet a safer place. It's sad we can't seem to have a productive conversation on the matter.
I advocate against DNSSEC in my personal life. I write about DNSSEC on HN because I write on HN a lot, and because this is a topic I have invested a lot of time in, going back long before the existence of HN itself. You can find stuff about it from me on NANOG in the 1990s. Your frustration seems like a "you" problem.
That doesn't make it correct. Imagine if someone had said, "We don't need to secure HTTP, we'll just rely on E2E encryption and trust-on-first-use". I would really like it if we had a way to automatically cryptographically verify non-web protocols when they connect.
But there is no money in making that a solution and a TON of money in selling you BS HTTPS certs. There is a lot of people spreading FUD about it. It's a shame.
Mark Shuttleworth paid for his ride to the space station by selling HTTPS certs.
The sad thing is that Mozilla and others have to spend millions bankrolling Let's Encrypt instead of using the free, high assurance PKI that is native to the internet!
It's not really free, though. Rather, the costs are distributed rather than centralized, but running DNSSEC and keeping it working incurs new operational costs for the domain holders, who need to manage keys and DNSSEC signing, etc. And of course there are additional marginal costs to the registrars of managing customer DNSSEC, both building automation and providing customer service when it fails.
It's of course possible that the total numbers are lower than the costs of the WebPKI -- I haven't run them -- but I don't think free is the right word.
I mean, I guess the costs are paid for by the domain name fee. But at least it doesn't have to be a charitable activity covered by non-profits. The early HTTPS certs were especially worthless and price-gouging.
> But at least it doesn't have to be a charitable activity covered by non-profits.
LE isn't primarily funded by non-profits, as you can see from the sponsor list here: https://isrg.org/sponsors/
Anyway, I think there's a reasonable case that it would be better to have the costs distributed the way DNSSEC does, but my point is just that it's not free. Rather, you're moving the costs around. Like I said, it may be cheaper in aggregate, but I think you'd need to make that case.
You're not providing any explanation for why I wouldn't trust OP on DNSSEC. And the FUD is pretty reasonable if you've had a lot of experience setting up certificate chains, because the chain of trust can fail for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with your certificate and are sometimes outside of your control. It would really suck to turn it on and have some 3rd-party provider not implement a feature you're relying on for your DNSSEC implementation and then suddenly it doesn't work and nobody can resolve your website anymore. I've had a lot of wonky experiences with different features in EG X.509 that I've come to really mistrust CA-based systems that I'm not in control of. When you get down to interoperability between different software implementations it gets even rougher.
Which is exactly what happened to Slack, and took them offline for most of a business day for a huge fraction of their customers. This is such a big problem that there's actually a subsidiary DNSSEC protocol (DNSSEC NTA's) that addresses it: tactically disabling DNSSEC at major resolvers for the inevitable cases where something breaks.
As if DNS isn't a major contributing to A LOT of downtime. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing not investing in making deployment more seamless and less error prone.
> As if DNS isn't a major contributing to A LOT of downtime. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing not investing in making deployment more seamless and less error prone.
Ah yes. Let's take something that's prone to causing service issues and strap more footguns to it.
It's not worth it, because the cost is extremely quantifiable and visible, whereas the benefits struggle to be coherent.
> DNSSEC mistakes take your entire domain off the Internet, as if it had never existed.
DNS mistakes take your entire domain off the Internet, as if it had never existed.
I'm preparing a proposal to add an advisory mode for DNSSEC. This will solve a lot of operational issues with its deployment. Enabling it will not have to be a leap of faith anymore.
I haven't had to edit the DNS zones for most of my domains in many years. DNSSEC adds an expiring, rotating key change regime to it. If you screw it up, the screwup is cached everywhere, and the failure mode isn't like HTTPS, where you get an annoying popup: you just get NXDOMAIN, as if your domain never existed.
This isn't so much as a scary story I'm telling so much as it is an empirically observable fact; it's happened many times, to very important domains, over the last several years.
Your objections basically boil down to: DNS is dangerous, and DNSSEC _is_ DNS. This is fair, but the conclusion for me is that we need to make _DNS_ more reliable. Not to keep treating it as a fragile Ming Dynasty vase.
In particular, the long TTL of DNS records itself is a historic artifact and should be phased out. There's absolutely no reason to keep it above ~15 minutes for the leaf zones. The overhead of doing additional DNS lookups is completely negligible.
> This isn't so much as a scary story I'm telling so much as it is an empirically observable fact; it's happened many times, to very important domains, over the last several years.
So has the TLS cert expiration. And while you can (usually) click through it in browsers, it's not the case for mobile apps or for IoT/embedded devices. Or even for JS-rich webapps that use XMLHttpRequest/fetch.
And we keep making Internet more fragile with the ".well-known" subtrees that are served over TLS. It's also now trivial for me to get a certificate for most domains if I can MITM their network.
Edit: BTW, what is exactly _expiring_ in DNSSEC? I've been using the same private key on my HSM for DNSSEC signing for the last decade. You also can set up signing once, and then never touch it.
This drills into the core problem: technologists like you look at DNSSEC and say "there is a problem, something must be done, this is something". But it's not enough to identify a problem and solution. The solution has to be worth the cost. Rollout can't be more costly than the original problem.
There's ample evidence that the cost/benefit math simply doesn't work out for DNSSEC.
You can design new DNSSECs with different cost profiles. I think a problem you'll run into is that the cost of the problem it solves is very low, so you won't have much headroom to maneuver in. But I'm not reflexively against ground-up retakes on DNSSEC.
Where you'll see viscerally negative takes from me is on attempts to take the current gravely flawed design --- offline signers+authenticated denial --- as a basis for those new solutions. The DNSSEC we're working with now has failed in the marketplace. In fact, it's failed more comprehensively than any IETF technology ever attempted: DNSSEC dates back into the early-mid 1990s. It's long past time to cut bait.
PEM actually gets used? People depend on it? It hasn't been a market success, but if the root keys for DNSSEC ended up on Pastebin this evening, almost nobody would need to be paged, and you can't say that about PEM.
Multicast gets used (I think unwisely) in campus/datacenter scenarios. Interdomain multicast was a total failure, but interdomain multicast is more recent than DNSSEC.
Fair enough on Multicast and HIP. I'm less sure about the case for PEM.
S-HTTP was a bigger failure in absolute terms (I should know!) but it was eventually published as Experimental and the IETF never really pushed it, so I don't think you could argue it was a bigger failure overall.
There really has been a 30+ year full-court press to make DNSSEC happen, including high-effort coordination with both operators and developers. I think the only comparable effort might be IPv6. But IPv6 is succeeding (slowly), and DNSSEC seems to have finally failed.
(I hate to IETFsplain anything to you so think of this as me baiting you into correcting me.)
To really nerd out about it, it seems to me there are two metrics.
1. How much it failed (i.e., how low adoption was).
2. How much effort the IETF and others put into selling it.
From that perspective, I think DNSSEC is the clear winner. There are other IETF protocols that have less usage, but none that have had anywhere near the amount of thrust applied as DNSSEC.
> There's ample evidence that the cost/benefit math simply doesn't work out for DNSSEC.
Why? What is the real difference between DNSSEC and HTTPS?
I'd argue that the only difference is that browser vendors care about protecting against MITM on the client side. They're fine with MITM on the server side or with (potentially state-sponsored) BGP prefix hijacks. And I'm not fine with that personally.
> Where you'll see viscerally negative takes from me is on attempts to take the current gravely flawed design --- offline signers+authenticated denial --- as a basis for those new solutions.
Yes, I agree with that. In particular, NSEC3 was a huge mistake, along with the complexity it added.
I think that we should have stuck with NSEC for the cases where enumeration is OK or with a "black lies"-like approach and online signing. It's also ironic because now many companies proactively publish all their internal names in the CT logs, so attackers don't even need to interact with the target's DNS to find out all its internal names.
> In fact, it's failed more comprehensively than any IETF technology ever attempted: DNSSEC dates back into the early-mid 1990s. It's long past time to cut bait.
I would say that IPv6 failed even more. It's also unfair to say that DNSSEC dates back to the 90-s, the root zone was signed only in 2008.
The good news is that DNSSEC can be improved a lot by just deprecating bad practices. And this will improve DNS robustness in general, regardless of DNSSEC use.
> I'd argue that the only difference is that browser vendors care about protecting against MITM on the client side. They're fine with MITM on the server side or with (potentially state-sponsored) BGP prefix hijacks. And I'm not fine with that personally.
Speaking as someone who was formerly responsible for deciding what a browser vendor cared about in this area, I don't think this is quite accurate. What browser vendors care about is that the traffic is securely conveyed to and from the server that the origin wanted it to be conveyed to. So yes, they definitely do care about active attack between the client and the server, but that's not the only thing.
To take the two examples you cite, they do care about BGP prefix hijacks. It's not generally the browser's job to do something about it directly, but in general misissuance of all stripes is one of the motivations for Certificate Transparency, and of course the BRs now require multi-perspective validation.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean by "MITM on the server side". Perhaps you're referring to CDNs which TLS terminate and then connect to the origin? If so, you're right that browser vendors aren't trying to stop this, because it's not the business of the browser how the origin organizes its infrastructure. I would note that DNSSEC does nothing to stop this either because the whole concept is the origin wants it.
Seriously? I'll give you two differences right off the bat:
1. DNSSEC only protects the name lookup for a host, and TLS/HTTPS protects the entire session.
2. People actually rely on TLS/HTTPS, and nobody relies on DNSSEC, to the point where the root keys for DNSSEC could be posted on Pastebin tonight and almost nobody would have to be paged. If the private key for a CA in any mainstream browser root program got published that way, it would be all hands on deck across the whole industry.
You can add multiple trust anchors to DNSSEC resolvers. Before the "." zone was signed, adding zone-specific anchors was the only way to get DNSSEC working.
Really? You're not concerned that someone might do a very specific kind of on-path DNS cache corruption attack, in 4-5 places simultaneously around the world to defeat multipath lookups at CAs, in order to misissue a certificate for your domain, which they can then leverage in MITM attacks they're somehow able to launch to get random people to think they're looking at your website when they're looking at something else? And that risk doesn't outweigh the fairly strong likelihood that at some point after you enable DNSSEC something will happen to break that configuration and make your entire domain fall off the Internet for several days?
I mean, now you've brought it up, I am concerned about it - but the level of concern is somewhere between "spontaneous combustion of myself leading to exploitation of my domain DNS because my bugger-i-ded.txt instructions are rubbish" and "cosmic rays hitting all the exact right bits at the exact right time to bugger my DNS deployment when I next do one which won't be for a while because even one a year is a fast pace for me to change something."
(Plus I'm perfectly capable of taking my sites and domains offline by incompetent flubbery as it is; I don't need -more- ways to fuck things up.)
It's great to see the free, cryptographically secure, and distributed keyval database that under-grids the entire internet being used to make it more secure. It's too bad lazy sys admins claim that it's not needed and spout a bunch of FUD [1] that is not true [2].
You haven't been a web developer since you posted that article either, since you won't retract silly arguments on your website:
"Government Controlled PKI!"
- Governments own the domains, you just rent them. They can kick your site off and validate their HTTPS certs regardless of DNSSEC.
"Weak Crypto!"
- 1K key sizes were fine given the threat model required cracking one in a year. They have since been increased.
"DNSSEC Doesn’t Protect Against MITM Attacks"
- DNSSEC protects against MITM attacks!
- It's just that most clients don't perform local validation due to low adoption.
- In reality, you are just making the circular argument to NOT adopt DNSSEC because adoption is low.
- There are LOTS more MITM opportunities with HTTPS. We spent a massive effort on cert transparency, yet even Cloudflare missed a rouge cert being issued.
"There are Better Alternatives to DNSSEC"
- There is no alternative to signing domain name data and you point to crypto systems that do something other than that.
- "There are better alternatives to HTTPS: E2E JS crypto with trust on first use"
- What about SSH? I guess we are doomed to run everything over HTTPS and pay dumb cert authorities for the privilege of doing so.
"Bloats record sizes"
- ECC sigs can be sent in a single packet.
- Caching makes first connect latency irrelevant.
On and on and on. These are trivially refutable but you just shut the conversation down and point out instances of downtime ... as if DNS doesn't cause a lot of downtime anyaway.
True, but DNSSEC doesn't need to worry about forward secrecy and it doesn't need quantum protection until someone can start breaking keys in under a year. Hopefully we will find more efficient PQC by then.
> People stopped caring about ulta-low latency first connect times back in the 90s.
They did? That's certainly going to be news to the people at Google, Mozilla, Cloudflare, etc. who put enormous amounts of effort into building 0-RTT into TLS 1.3 and QUIC.
I did a large data analysis of DNS caching times across the web. Hyperscalers are the only ones who care and they fix that with insanely long DNS caching.
I'm not trying to just nitpick you here, but, the message I was responding to said "People stopped caring about ulta-low latency first connect times back in the 90s.".
It seems to me that you're saying here that (1) the hyperscalers do care but (2) it's under control. I'm not necessarily arguing with (2) but as far as the hyperscalers go: (1) they drive a lot of traffic on their own (2) in many cases they care so their users don't have to.
>We might see a day when HTTPS key pinning and the preload list is implemented across all major browsers, but we will never see these protections applied in a uniform fashion across all major runtime environments (Node.js, Java, .NET, etc.)[...]
It's actually not safe for clients to perform local validation because a quite significant fraction of middleboxes and the like strip out RRSIG and the like or otherwise tamper with the records in such a way that the signatures don't validate.
No! Because it's totally possible for operating system vendors to flip that switch without requiring every upstream project to adopt key pinning. It's MUCH less infrastructure to upgrade.
You claim in a sibling comment that you have engaged with my points, yet when I talk to you about it you just shut down the conversation.
You really aren't going to respond to any of those points? You stand by your complaint DNSSEC being "government controlled PKI" when TLDs are a government controlled naming system? And your alternative is to advocate for privately owned PKI run by companies with no accountability that are also much more vulnerable to attack?
Campaigning against cryptographically signing DNS records is a weird life choice man.
You're on tilt. It's fine that we disagree about DNSSEC. You seem very angry that you? (it was you, I gather?) wrote a post disagreeing with my post, and I didn't go back and revise my post to capture all the arguments you had that I disagreed with. Sorry, but not sorry. This is just crudding up the thread now though.
If I've said something in this thread that you disagree with, say so and say why (you'll need something better than "I wrote about this 11 years ago and you weren't nice enough to me about it"). Right now, all you're doing is yelling about a post I wrote 11 years ago and haven't cited once on this thread.
Of course, as you know, I stand by that post. But it's not germane to the thread.
I'm upset that your incorrect arguments have gotten so much traction that the internet is a less safe place for it.
> wrote a post disagreeing with my post, and I didn't go back and revise my post to capture all the arguments you had that I disagreed with. Sorry, but not sorry.
You in a sibling thread:
> I feel pretty confident that the search bar refutes this claim you're making. What you're trying to argue is that I've avoided opportunities to argue about DNSSEC on HN. Seems... unlikely.
It seemed like you wanted to have this discussion but I guess not.
> yelling about a post I wrote 11 years ago and haven't cited once on this thread. ... Of course, as you know, I stand by that post. But it's not germane to the thread.
Do you know what comment thread you are in? I complained about FUD and cited your blogpost. This is what this thread is about.
It is absolutely not true that everybody agrees DNSSEC adoption is important. Much of the failure of DNSSEC adoption is operators believing it's not important.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to design a new, simple API and glue for doing secure DNS lookups just for certificate issuance? It could look more like dnscurve or even like HTTPS: have a new resource, say NSS, in parallel with NS. To securely traverse to a subdomain, you would query the parent for NSS and, if the record is present, you would learn an IP address and a public key hash or certificate hash that you can query via HTTPS to read the next domain. And this whole spec would say that normal HTTPS clients and OS resolvers SHOULD NOT use it. So if you mess it up, your site doesn’t go offline.
(HTTPS really needs a way to make a URL where the URL itself encodes the keying information.)
Yes. WebPKI people have been talking about doing that for a long time. There's a couple different angles you can come up with on it, including things like RDAP to directly query registrars for ownership of a domain, and speaking DoH all the way up to authorities.
Presumably the problem is that it just takes for-fucking-ever to make anything happen inside CA/BForum. Case in point: we were all today years old before CA/BForum required CAs to actually use DNSSEC if it's set up.
Even if you hate dnssec (and there are many legit criticisms to make) i think it does make sense for CA's to validate it if its there. Its low effort on the CA side, and there isn't really very much downside if its already active.
DNSSEC is one of very few topics where voices I respect on security seem completely opposed (WebPKI depends on DNS vs. DNS security does not matter). Is there any literature that demonstrates deep understanding of both arguments? Why are they (DNSSEC + WebPKI) never considered complimentary?
You'll have to judge for yourself whether this demonstrates deep understanding of both arguments, but I did try to be evenhanded in these posts:
https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/dns-security-dnssec/ https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/dns-security-dane/
From my perspective, the challenge with DNSSEC is that it just doesn't have a very good cost/benefit ratio. Once the WebPKI exists, "critical path" use of DNSSEC only offers modest value. Now, obviously, this article is about requiring CAs to check DNSSEC, which is out of the critical path and of some value, but it's not clear to me it's of enough value to get people to actually roll out DNSSEC.
> Why are they (DNSSEC + WebPKI) never considered complimentary?
WebPKI works without DNSSEC, whereas DANE (a more secure WebPKI replacement) depends on a robust DNSSEC deployment.
I'll share a couple of thoughts, but do read EKR's blog first:
- Web PKI is inherently insecure and can't be fixed on its own. The root problem is that the CAs we "trust" can issue certificates without technical controls. The best we can do is ask them to be nice and force them provide a degree of (certificate) transparency to enable monitoring. This is still being worked on. [3]
- The (very, very) big advantage of Web PKI is that it operates online and supports handshake negotiation. As a result, iteration can happen quickly if people are motivated. A few large players can get together and effect a big change (e.g., X25519MLKEM768). DNSSEC was designed for offline operation and lacks negotiation, which means that everyone has to agree before changes can happen. Example: Kipp Hickman created SSL and Web PKI in 3 months, by himself [1]. DNSSEC took years and years.
- DNSSEC could have been fixed, but Web PKI was "good enough" and the remaining problem wasn't sufficiently critical.
- A few big corporations control this space, and they chose Web PKI.
- A humongous amount of resources has been spent on iterating and improving Web PKI in the last 30 years. So many people configuring certificates, breaking stuff, certificates expiring... we've wasted so much of our collective lives. There is a parallel universe in which encryption keys sit in DNS and, in it, no one has to care about certificate rotation.
- DNSSEC can't ever work end-to-end because of DNS ossification. End-user software (e.g., browsers) can't reliably obtain any new DNS resource records, be it DANE or SVCB/HTTPS.
- The one remaining realistic use for DNSSEC is to bootstrap Web PKI and, possibly, secure server-to-server communication. This is happening, now that CAs are required to validate DNSSEC. This one changes finally makes it possible to configure strong cryptographic validation before certificate issuance. [2]
[1] https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/issue_131_the_legend_o...
[2] https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/issue_126_internet_pki...
[3] https://redsift.com/guides/a-guide-to-high-assurance-certifi...
Bad arguments and FUD when it was being rolled out. Sysadmins also don't want to touch working infra code, you can see that with AWS lagging on IPv6.
Who's the most reputable cryptographer you can think of who publicly supports DNSSEC? We'd like to interview them on SCW.
You are going to complain that the key sizes are too small despite the guidelines being updated a long time ago. Then you will argue adoption of larger keys sizes is to low. Then you will argue that we should just not sign domain name authority delegation records at all (i.e. DNSSEC) and that we should abandon shoring up authenticated DNS because there is no adoption.
You have any cryptographers that are satisfied with unauthenticated name server checks?
Yes? Lots of them? But also: you didn't answer my question.
Okay, but after this I have to go back to work.
You got a point: 1k isn't great and of course mainstream cryptographers will advocate for higher. That doesn't change that it's still acceptable within the existing security model nor that better alternatives are available. The cryptographic strength of DNSSEC isn't a limiting factor that fatally dooms the whole project. We have to upgrade the crypto used in large-scale infrastructure all the time!
And yes, uptake of better crypto is poor but I find chicken-and-egg arguments disingenuous when coming from someone who zealously advocates to make it worse. Furthermore, your alternative is no signing of DNS records. Find me a cryptographer who thinks no PKI is a better alternative. I know DJB griped about DNSSEC when proposing DNSCurve, which protects the privacy of the payload but not the intergrity of the payload.
I enabled DNSSEC a couple of years ago on my self hosted powerdns setup. I sign the zone locally, than build docker containers via SSH on the target nodes.
I made a mistake once and signed with wrong keys which then broke DANE. It‘s good to validate your DNSSEC (and DANE, CAA etc.) setup through external monitoring.
In case the post is fuzzy: what's changed is that as of March 2026, CAs are required to validate DNSSEC if it's enabled when doing DCV or CAA. Previously, it was technically the case that a CA could ignore DNSSEC if you had it set up on your domains, though LetsEncrypt has (as I understand it) been checking DNSSEC pretty much this whole time.
If you own and host your own domain, it's probably very easy to have your DNS provider enable DNSSEC for you, maybe just a button click. They'd sure like you to do that, because DNSSEC is itself quite complicated, and once you press that button it's much less likely that you're going to leave your provider. DNSSEC mistakes take your entire domain off the Internet, as if it had never existed.
There's a research project, started at KU Leuven, that attempts an unbiased "top N" list of most popular domains; it's called the Tranco List. For the last year or so, I've monitored the top 1000 domains on the Tranco list to see which have DNSSEC enabled. You can see that here:
https://dnssecmenot.fly.dev/
There's 2 tl;dr's to this:
First, DNSSEC penetration in the top 1000 is single digits % (dropping sharply, down to 2%, as you scope down to the top 100).
Second, in a year of monitoring and recording every change in DNSSEC state on every domain in this list, I've seen just three Tranco Top 1000 domains change their DNSSEC state, and one of those changes was Canva disabling DNSSEC. (I think, as of a few weeks ago, they've re-enabled it again). Think about that: 1000 very popular domains, and just 0.3% of them thought even a second about DNSSEC.
DNSSEC is moribund.
That’s a fun list, the only hits in the top 100 are actually Cloudflare, for whom automatic DNSSEC is a feature, and would be a bad look not to dogfood it.
(I did a lot of the work of shipping that product in a past life. We had to fight the protocol and sometimes the implementers to beat it into something deployable. I am proud of that work from a technical point of view, but I agree DNSSEC adds little systemic value and haven’t thought about it since moving on from that project almost 10 years ago. It doesn’t look like DNSSEC itself has changed since, either.)
Then a few government sites, which have mandated it. The first hit after those is around #150.
What's your replacement if DNSSEC is moribund?
It seems to me like it actually solves a problem, what is the solution to "I want/need to be able to trust the DNS answer" without DNSSEC?
Largely, DNS integrity has been addressed by making it harder to spoof dns responses without visibility.
Resolvers have put in the effort to use most of the range of source ports and all of the range of request ids, as well as mixed caps, so predicting queries is difficult and blind spoofing requires an unreasonable number of packets.
Additionally, commercial DNS services tend to be well connected anycast. This means most queries can be served with a very low round trip time; reducing the spoofing window. Additionally, there's less opportunity to observe requests as they traverse fewer networks and less distance.
Generally, traffic has moved to certificate authenticated protocols. CAs are required to verify domain control from multiple locations, so an attacker asserting domain control would need to do so for the victim as well as multiple other locations in order to get a certificate issued.
Further; if we assume you plan to assert domain control by taking over or MITMing the IP of a DNS server, it seems likely you could do the same for the IP of an application server. DNSSEC doesn't help very much in that case. (DNSSEC with DANE could help in that case, but to a first approximation, nothing supports that, and there doesn't appear to be any movement towards it)
Port randomization helps against blind spoofing, but once an attacker is on-path or owns a resolver, it stops mattering.
If an attacker owns a resolver DNSSEC stops mattering too; from the resolver to the stub-resolver, the protocol collapses down to a single "yes we did DNSSEC" bit in the header.
The bigger thing here is DoH, which has very real penetration, and works for zones that don't do anything to opt-in. That's what a good design looks like: it just works without uninvolved people having to do extra stuff.
I think DNSSEC supporters, what few of them are left, are really deep into cope about what transport security is doing to the the rationale for DNSSEC deployment. There's nothing about DoH that makes it complicated to speak it to an authority server. The only reason I can see that we're not going to get that is that multi-perspective kills the value proposition of even doing that much.
> There's nothing about DoH that makes it complicated to speak it to an authority server.
There’s a problem with HTTPS, though. HTTPS uses URLs that use WebPKI to tie the URL to the certificate validation algorithm. Which means you need WebPKI certificates, which needs DNS. Chicken, meet egg.
Maybe there could be a new URL scheme that doesn’t need WebPKI. It could be spelled like:
or maybe something slightly crazy and even somewhat backwards compatible if the CA/browser people wouldn’t blow a fuse: explicit_key.net would be some appropriate reserved domain, and some neutral party (ICANN?) could actually register it, expose the appropriate A records and, using a trusted and name-constrained intermediate CA, issue actual certificates that allow existing browsers to validate the key material in the domain name.I think stuff like this is more than promising; I think it's likely to happen relatively soon.
It seems pretty clear to me that the industry, and particularly the slice of the industry that operates large, important sites and staffs big security teams, doesn't believe this is a meaningful problem at all.
I agree with them.
Would this article not be evidence the part of the industry that makes up the CA/B Forum (i.e. CAs and Browsers) disagree?
The fact that it's 2026 and the CAs are only now getting around to requiring any CA to take DNSSEC, which has in its current form been operational for well over a decade, makes you take DNSSEC more seriously?
Why dodge the question? Clearly they care today, and I live in today.
If we're doing to defer to industry, does only the opinion of website operators matter, or do browsers and CAs matter too? Browsers and CAs tend to be pretty important and staff big security teams too.
Are they requiring DNSSEC in order to acquire the certificate? That would be a better indicator to me that it's not security theater=security
Barely 5% of the internet have DNSSEC signed zones and a big chunk of that are handled by CDN's that do the signing automagically for the domain owner as they also host SOA DNS. Mandating DNSSEC would require years of planning and warning those that have not yet set it up and in my opinion DNSSEC tooling should become a better first class citizen in all of the authoritative DNS daemons. as in there should be so many levels of error handling and validation that it would be next to impossible for anyone to break their zones.
So do we wait for all the stragglers? Wait for the top 500 or top 2500 to make it mandatory? Who takes financial responsibility for those that fell through the cracks?
No CA requires DNSSEC. Obviously they can't: almost nothing is signed. The only change "today" is that technically CAs are now required to honor DNSSEC, where they weren't before.
I think the fact they don't require it shows it's moribund. If cert providers (or google with their big stick of chrome) specified it is required to have DNSSEC to get a certificate, everyone would jump in line and set it up because there'd be no other choice.
I agree that not checking it all is an even worse signal. I'm just saying the fact that this is officially enforced only in 2026 is itself a bad signal. At any rate, the CAs you'd have worked with were enforcing DNSSEC this whole time.
Which is really unfortunate, since it's pretty easy to do.
I agree that it's relatively easy for CAs to validate DNSSEC. I think the fact that they weren't technically required to, despite the sole remaining use case for DNSSEC being to protect against misissuance, is a pretty strong indicator of how cooked DNSSEC is.
Yeah but CAs want to sell you certificates, and browsers compete on their support for those certificates.
Huh? They really don't. It's actually kind of unfortunate that browsers don't have uniform policies about what certificates they accept, but for obvious reasons each browser wants to make their own decision.
Big sites don't have the same concerns as individual end users, in this case specifically about centralized servers surveilling DNS queries.
DNSSEC zone signing lets one resolve records without having to directly go through trusted (ie centralizing) nameservers. (If you run your own recursive resolver this just changes the set of trusted servers to the zones' servers).
I've made this argument in the context of your poo-pooing DNSSEC before, and I don't expect you to be receptive to it this time. Rather I just really wish I could get around to writing code to demonstrate what I mean.
It will change as soon as one of them gets meaningfully DNS hijacked.
Zones get meaningfully hijacked all the time. It just doesn't happen through cache poisoning; it happens through phished registrar accounts.
> If you own and host your own domain, it's probably very easy to have your DNS provider enable DNSSEC for you
It isn't that easy on AWS.
It also generally is not that easy if your domain registrar is not the same as your dns host, because it involves both parties. And some registrers don't have APIs for automatic certificate rotation, so you have to manually rotate the certs periodically.
I have a setup with separated dns and domain since 2021. Using a CSK with unlimited lifetime, I never had to rotate. And could easily also migrate both parts (having a copy of the key material)
Register only has public material
The master is bind9, and any semi-trusted provider can be used as slave/redundency/cdn getting zonetransfers including the RRsigs
> Using a CSK with unlimited lifetime
Well in cases where I have had to deal with DNSSEC, I've had to rotate the KSK annually for compliance reasons.
> DNSSEC is moribund.
You’ve clearly put a lot of effort into limiting adoption. I’d really value your thoughts on this response to your anti-DNSSEC arguments:
https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
I'm sure you can find several of those using the search bar. The argument has gotten a lot grimmer since 2015 --- DNSSEC lost deployment in North America over the last couple years. It didn't simply plateau off and stop growing: people have started turning it off. That corresponds with the success of CT in the WebPKI, with multi-perspective lookup, with the failure of DANE stapling in tls-wg, and with domain hijacking through registrar fixing.
> DNSSEC
And NTP, which is basically a dependency for DNSSEC due to validity intervals too;
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270665 :
> By assigning Decentralized Identifiers (like did:tdw or SSH-key DIDs) to individual time servers and managing their state with Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI), we can completely bypass the TLS chicken-and-egg problem where a client needs the correct time to validate a server's certificate.
> To future-proof such a protocol, we can replace heavy certificate chains with stateless hash-based signatures (SPHINCS+, XMSS^MT) paired with lightweight zkSNARKs. If a node is compromised, its identity can be instantly revoked and globally broadcast via Merkle Tree Certificates and DID micro-ledgers, entirely removing DNS from the security dependency chain.
The system described there I think could replace NTP NTS, DNS, DNSSEC, and maybe CA PKI revocation; PQ with Merkle Tree certificates
Was wondering how long it'd take you to come in and trash talk DNSSEC. And now with added FUD ("and once you press that button it's much less likely that you're going to leave your provider").
At least you're consistent.
This is a topic I obviously pay a lot of attention to. Wouldn't it be weirder if I came here with a different take? What do you expect?
I don't think I'm out on a limb suggesting that random small domains should not enable DNSSEC. There's basically zero upside to it for them. I think there's basically never a good argument to enable it, but at least large, heavily targeted sites have a colorable argument.
Actually I think it probably is suspicious to have the exact same opinion after studying something over a long period of time. My opinions are more likely to remain consistent, rather than growing more nuanced or sophisticated, if all I've done is trot out the same responses over a longer period of time.
I've struggled to think of an especially unexamined example because after all they tend to sit out of conscious recall, I think the best I can do is probably that my favourite comic book character is Miracleman's daughter, Winter Moran. That's a consistent belief I've held for decades, I haven't spent a great deal of time thinking about it, but it's not entirely satisfactory and probably there is some introduced nuance, particularly when I re-examined the contrast between what Winter says about the humans to her father and what her step-sister Mist later says about them to her (human) mother because I was writing an essay during lockdown.
It would make them more secure and less vulnerable to attacks. But lazy sysadmins and large providers are too scared to do anything, in no small part due to your ... incorrect arguments against it.
No it wouldn't? How exactly would it make them more secure? It makes availability drastically more precarious and defends against a rare, exotic attack none of them actually face and which in the main is conducted by state-level adversaries for whom DNSSEC is literally a key escrow system. People are not thinking this through.
Boy, how would cryptographically the ROOT of the internet make it more secure? Right here dude: https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
That entire post is that you should enable DNSSEC because it's "more secure", and there are no reasons not to.
"More secure" begs the question "against what?", which the blog post doesn't seem to want to go into. Maybe it's secure from hidden tigers.
My favourite DNSSEC "lolwut" is about how people argue that it's something "NIST recommends", whilst at the same time the most recent major DNSSEC outage was......... time.nist.gov! (https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html)
You keep waving this blog post from 2015 at me. Not only have we discussed it before, but it was a top-level HN post with 79 comments, many of them from me.
Please don't stealth-edit your posts after I respond to them. If you need to edit, just leave a little note in your comment that you edited it.
Sorry, I thought my edit was fast enough.
Yes it did hit HN and you just said, "I stand by what I wrote." and then complain about buggy implementations and downtime connected to DNSSEC. As if that isn't true for all technologies, let alone /insecure/ DNS. DNS is connected to a lot of downtime because it undergirds the whole internet. Making the distributed database that delegates domain authority cryptographically secure makes everything above it more secure too.
I rebutted your arguments point-by-point. You don't update your blog post to reflect those arguments nor recent developments, like larger key sizes.
Did you write the article?
Yup.
So: I wrote a blog post in January of 2015, and 7 months later you wrote a blog post responding to it in August of 2015, and 10 years later you're still angry that I didn't update my blog post to point to the post that you wrote?
I write things people disagree with all the time. I can't recall ever having been mad that people didn't cite me for things we disagree about. Should I have expected all the people who hated coding agents to update their articles when I wrote "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts"? I didn't realize I was supposed to be complaining about that.
I advocate for DNSSEC in my personal life and you happen to jump on every DNSSEC HN submission and repeat your claims. So I post a link to my article debunking them. You won't engage in the substantive points here but insist that you have in the past and that you stand by your post. So I suggest your update your post to address my critiques.
I'm frustrated that you seem to blow me off and insult me when I try to engage in good faith discussion, but I'm not angry at you. I just ran into this post while procrastinating at work and here we are, in the same loop.
I think we are both trying to make the internet a safer place. It's sad we can't seem to have a productive conversation on the matter.
I advocate against DNSSEC in my personal life. I write about DNSSEC on HN because I write on HN a lot, and because this is a topic I have invested a lot of time in, going back long before the existence of HN itself. You can find stuff about it from me on NANOG in the 1990s. Your frustration seems like a "you" problem.
> I don't think I'm out on a limb suggesting that random small domains should not enable DNSSEC.
Why? I can see this argument for large domains that might be using things like anycast and/or geography-specific replies. But for smaller domains?
> There's basically zero upside to it for them.
It can reduce susceptibility to automated wormable attacks. Or to BGP-mediated attacks.
Its not like its just tptacek with this take, i would say its the majority view in the industry.
That doesn't make it correct. Imagine if someone had said, "We don't need to secure HTTP, we'll just rely on E2E encryption and trust-on-first-use". I would really like it if we had a way to automatically cryptographically verify non-web protocols when they connect.
But there is no money in making that a solution and a TON of money in selling you BS HTTPS certs. There is a lot of people spreading FUD about it. It's a shame.
> But there is no money in making that a solution and a TON of money in selling you BS HTTPS certs
Ah yes, because lets encrypt is rolling in the $$$$.
Mark Shuttleworth paid for his ride to the space station by selling HTTPS certs.
The sad thing is that Mozilla and others have to spend millions bankrolling Let's Encrypt instead of using the free, high assurance PKI that is native to the internet!
It's not really free, though. Rather, the costs are distributed rather than centralized, but running DNSSEC and keeping it working incurs new operational costs for the domain holders, who need to manage keys and DNSSEC signing, etc. And of course there are additional marginal costs to the registrars of managing customer DNSSEC, both building automation and providing customer service when it fails.
It's of course possible that the total numbers are lower than the costs of the WebPKI -- I haven't run them -- but I don't think free is the right word.
I mean, I guess the costs are paid for by the domain name fee. But at least it doesn't have to be a charitable activity covered by non-profits. The early HTTPS certs were especially worthless and price-gouging.
> But at least it doesn't have to be a charitable activity covered by non-profits.
LE isn't primarily funded by non-profits, as you can see from the sponsor list here: https://isrg.org/sponsors/
Anyway, I think there's a reasonable case that it would be better to have the costs distributed the way DNSSEC does, but my point is just that it's not free. Rather, you're moving the costs around. Like I said, it may be cheaper in aggregate, but I think you'd need to make that case.
Yes, the whole point of LetsEncrypt was to prevent that from happening again, and it now dominates the market.
You're not providing any explanation for why I wouldn't trust OP on DNSSEC. And the FUD is pretty reasonable if you've had a lot of experience setting up certificate chains, because the chain of trust can fail for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with your certificate and are sometimes outside of your control. It would really suck to turn it on and have some 3rd-party provider not implement a feature you're relying on for your DNSSEC implementation and then suddenly it doesn't work and nobody can resolve your website anymore. I've had a lot of wonky experiences with different features in EG X.509 that I've come to really mistrust CA-based systems that I'm not in control of. When you get down to interoperability between different software implementations it gets even rougher.
Which is exactly what happened to Slack, and took them offline for most of a business day for a huge fraction of their customers. This is such a big problem that there's actually a subsidiary DNSSEC protocol (DNSSEC NTA's) that addresses it: tactically disabling DNSSEC at major resolvers for the inevitable cases where something breaks.
As if DNS isn't a major contributing to A LOT of downtime. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing not investing in making deployment more seamless and less error prone.
The difference is DNS provides a fairly obvious up side
> As if DNS isn't a major contributing to A LOT of downtime. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing not investing in making deployment more seamless and less error prone.
Ah yes. Let's take something that's prone to causing service issues and strap more footguns to it.
It's not worth it, because the cost is extremely quantifiable and visible, whereas the benefits struggle to be coherent.
The benefits are huge: there are lots of attacks that DNSSEC trivially prevents and it would help secure more than just web browsers.
Can you expand on this a bit, under the assumption that the traffic is using some form of transport security (e.g., TLS, SSH, etc.)?
> DNSSEC mistakes take your entire domain off the Internet, as if it had never existed.
DNS mistakes take your entire domain off the Internet, as if it had never existed.
I'm preparing a proposal to add an advisory mode for DNSSEC. This will solve a lot of operational issues with its deployment. Enabling it will not have to be a leap of faith anymore.
I haven't had to edit the DNS zones for most of my domains in many years. DNSSEC adds an expiring, rotating key change regime to it. If you screw it up, the screwup is cached everywhere, and the failure mode isn't like HTTPS, where you get an annoying popup: you just get NXDOMAIN, as if your domain never existed.
This isn't so much as a scary story I'm telling so much as it is an empirically observable fact; it's happened many times, to very important domains, over the last several years.
Your objections basically boil down to: DNS is dangerous, and DNSSEC _is_ DNS. This is fair, but the conclusion for me is that we need to make _DNS_ more reliable. Not to keep treating it as a fragile Ming Dynasty vase.
In particular, the long TTL of DNS records itself is a historic artifact and should be phased out. There's absolutely no reason to keep it above ~15 minutes for the leaf zones. The overhead of doing additional DNS lookups is completely negligible.
> This isn't so much as a scary story I'm telling so much as it is an empirically observable fact; it's happened many times, to very important domains, over the last several years.
So has the TLS cert expiration. And while you can (usually) click through it in browsers, it's not the case for mobile apps or for IoT/embedded devices. Or even for JS-rich webapps that use XMLHttpRequest/fetch.
And we keep making Internet more fragile with the ".well-known" subtrees that are served over TLS. It's also now trivial for me to get a certificate for most domains if I can MITM their network.
Edit: BTW, what is exactly _expiring_ in DNSSEC? I've been using the same private key on my HSM for DNSSEC signing for the last decade. You also can set up signing once, and then never touch it.
This drills into the core problem: technologists like you look at DNSSEC and say "there is a problem, something must be done, this is something". But it's not enough to identify a problem and solution. The solution has to be worth the cost. Rollout can't be more costly than the original problem.
There's ample evidence that the cost/benefit math simply doesn't work out for DNSSEC.
You can design new DNSSECs with different cost profiles. I think a problem you'll run into is that the cost of the problem it solves is very low, so you won't have much headroom to maneuver in. But I'm not reflexively against ground-up retakes on DNSSEC.
Where you'll see viscerally negative takes from me is on attempts to take the current gravely flawed design --- offline signers+authenticated denial --- as a basis for those new solutions. The DNSSEC we're working with now has failed in the marketplace. In fact, it's failed more comprehensively than any IETF technology ever attempted: DNSSEC dates back into the early-mid 1990s. It's long past time to cut bait.
> In fact, it's failed more comprehensively than any IETF technology ever attempted
Now here is where I disagree. Just off the top of my head, how about HIP, IP multicast and PEM?
PEM actually gets used? People depend on it? It hasn't been a market success, but if the root keys for DNSSEC ended up on Pastebin this evening, almost nobody would need to be paged, and you can't say that about PEM.
Multicast gets used (I think unwisely) in campus/datacenter scenarios. Interdomain multicast was a total failure, but interdomain multicast is more recent than DNSSEC.
HIP is mid-aughts, isn't it?
Fair enough on Multicast and HIP. I'm less sure about the case for PEM.
S-HTTP was a bigger failure in absolute terms (I should know!) but it was eventually published as Experimental and the IETF never really pushed it, so I don't think you could argue it was a bigger failure overall.
There really has been a 30+ year full-court press to make DNSSEC happen, including high-effort coordination with both operators and developers. I think the only comparable effort might be IPv6. But IPv6 is succeeding (slowly), and DNSSEC seems to have finally failed.
(I hate to IETFsplain anything to you so think of this as me baiting you into correcting me.)
Oh, I was basically agreeing with you.
To really nerd out about it, it seems to me there are two metrics.
1. How much it failed (i.e., how low adoption was). 2. How much effort the IETF and others put into selling it.
From that perspective, I think DNSSEC is the clear winner. There are other IETF protocols that have less usage, but none that have had anywhere near the amount of thrust applied as DNSSEC.
> There's ample evidence that the cost/benefit math simply doesn't work out for DNSSEC.
Why? What is the real difference between DNSSEC and HTTPS?
I'd argue that the only difference is that browser vendors care about protecting against MITM on the client side. They're fine with MITM on the server side or with (potentially state-sponsored) BGP prefix hijacks. And I'm not fine with that personally.
> Where you'll see viscerally negative takes from me is on attempts to take the current gravely flawed design --- offline signers+authenticated denial --- as a basis for those new solutions.
Yes, I agree with that. In particular, NSEC3 was a huge mistake, along with the complexity it added.
I think that we should have stuck with NSEC for the cases where enumeration is OK or with a "black lies"-like approach and online signing. It's also ironic because now many companies proactively publish all their internal names in the CT logs, so attackers don't even need to interact with the target's DNS to find out all its internal names.
> In fact, it's failed more comprehensively than any IETF technology ever attempted: DNSSEC dates back into the early-mid 1990s. It's long past time to cut bait.
I would say that IPv6 failed even more. It's also unfair to say that DNSSEC dates back to the 90-s, the root zone was signed only in 2008.
The good news is that DNSSEC can be improved a lot by just deprecating bad practices. And this will improve DNS robustness in general, regardless of DNSSEC use.
> I'd argue that the only difference is that browser vendors care about protecting against MITM on the client side. They're fine with MITM on the server side or with (potentially state-sponsored) BGP prefix hijacks. And I'm not fine with that personally.
Speaking as someone who was formerly responsible for deciding what a browser vendor cared about in this area, I don't think this is quite accurate. What browser vendors care about is that the traffic is securely conveyed to and from the server that the origin wanted it to be conveyed to. So yes, they definitely do care about active attack between the client and the server, but that's not the only thing.
To take the two examples you cite, they do care about BGP prefix hijacks. It's not generally the browser's job to do something about it directly, but in general misissuance of all stripes is one of the motivations for Certificate Transparency, and of course the BRs now require multi-perspective validation.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean by "MITM on the server side". Perhaps you're referring to CDNs which TLS terminate and then connect to the origin? If so, you're right that browser vendors aren't trying to stop this, because it's not the business of the browser how the origin organizes its infrastructure. I would note that DNSSEC does nothing to stop this either because the whole concept is the origin wants it.
Seriously? I'll give you two differences right off the bat:
1. DNSSEC only protects the name lookup for a host, and TLS/HTTPS protects the entire session.
2. People actually rely on TLS/HTTPS, and nobody relies on DNSSEC, to the point where the root keys for DNSSEC could be posted on Pastebin tonight and almost nobody would have to be paged. If the private key for a CA in any mainstream browser root program got published that way, it would be all hands on deck across the whole industry.
Is there non-ICANN DNSSEC
Everyone knows "WebPKI", e.g., self-appointed "cert authorities", generally relies on DNS
With an added DNSSEC step, perhaps this is now limited to ICANN DNS only
Self-appointed "cert authorities" checking with self-appointed domainname "authority". A closed system
You can add multiple trust anchors to DNSSEC resolvers. Before the "." zone was signed, adding zone-specific anchors was the only way to get DNSSEC working.
I'm too afraid to turn it on.
Really? You're not concerned that someone might do a very specific kind of on-path DNS cache corruption attack, in 4-5 places simultaneously around the world to defeat multipath lookups at CAs, in order to misissue a certificate for your domain, which they can then leverage in MITM attacks they're somehow able to launch to get random people to think they're looking at your website when they're looking at something else? And that risk doesn't outweigh the fairly strong likelihood that at some point after you enable DNSSEC something will happen to break that configuration and make your entire domain fall off the Internet for several days?
> You're not concerned that someone might do ...
I mean, now you've brought it up, I am concerned about it - but the level of concern is somewhere between "spontaneous combustion of myself leading to exploitation of my domain DNS because my bugger-i-ded.txt instructions are rubbish" and "cosmic rays hitting all the exact right bits at the exact right time to bugger my DNS deployment when I next do one which won't be for a while because even one a year is a fast pace for me to change something."
(Plus I'm perfectly capable of taking my sites and domains offline by incompetent flubbery as it is; I don't need -more- ways to fuck things up.)
> make your entire domain fall off the Internet for several days
Yes, exactly.
Can't tell if sarcasm.
It's sarcasm.
If you handle minimal traffic loads it should be fine.
On a busy site, the incurred additional load cost can bite hard.
A lot of people will leave it off for the same reasons as DoH or DoT. =3
It's great to see the free, cryptographically secure, and distributed keyval database that under-grids the entire internet being used to make it more secure. It's too bad lazy sys admins claim that it's not needed and spout a bunch of FUD [1] that is not true [2].
[1]: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/ [2]: https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
I hope you will never have to implement DNSSEC
I worked at a DNS provider, does that count?
I haven't been a "sysadmin" since 1996.
You haven't been a web developer since you posted that article either, since you won't retract silly arguments on your website:
"Government Controlled PKI!"
- Governments own the domains, you just rent them. They can kick your site off and validate their HTTPS certs regardless of DNSSEC.
"Weak Crypto!"
- 1K key sizes were fine given the threat model required cracking one in a year. They have since been increased.
"DNSSEC Doesn’t Protect Against MITM Attacks"
- DNSSEC protects against MITM attacks!
- It's just that most clients don't perform local validation due to low adoption.
- In reality, you are just making the circular argument to NOT adopt DNSSEC because adoption is low.
- There are LOTS more MITM opportunities with HTTPS. We spent a massive effort on cert transparency, yet even Cloudflare missed a rouge cert being issued.
"There are Better Alternatives to DNSSEC"
- There is no alternative to signing domain name data and you point to crypto systems that do something other than that.
- "There are better alternatives to HTTPS: E2E JS crypto with trust on first use"
- What about SSH? I guess we are doomed to run everything over HTTPS and pay dumb cert authorities for the privilege of doing so.
"Bloats record sizes"
- ECC sigs can be sent in a single packet.
- Caching makes first connect latency irrelevant.
On and on and on. These are trivially refutable but you just shut the conversation down and point out instances of downtime ... as if DNS doesn't cause a lot of downtime anyaway.
> "Bloats record sizes"
> - ECC sigs can be sent in a single packet.
It's 2026. If you're deploying a cryptosystem and not considering post-quantum in your analysis, you'd best have a damn good reason.
ECC signs might be small, but the world will be moving to ML-DSA-44 in the near future. That needs to be in your calculus.
True, but DNSSEC doesn't need to worry about forward secrecy and it doesn't need quantum protection until someone can start breaking keys in under a year. Hopefully we will find more efficient PQC by then.
People tried to move DNSSEC from RSA to ECC more than a decade ago. How'd that migration go? If you like, I can give you APNIC's answer.
RSA is still fine given that you can't break it in a year and we aren't worried about forward secrecy.
Also, I worked for a DNS company. People stopped caring about ulta-low latency first connect times back in the 90s.
You are clearly very proud of your work devaluing DNSSEC. But pointing to lack of adoption doesn't make your arguments valid.
> People stopped caring about ulta-low latency first connect times back in the 90s.
They did? That's certainly going to be news to the people at Google, Mozilla, Cloudflare, etc. who put enormous amounts of effort into building 0-RTT into TLS 1.3 and QUIC.
I did a large data analysis of DNS caching times across the web. Hyperscalers are the only ones who care and they fix that with insanely long DNS caching.
I'm not trying to just nitpick you here, but, the message I was responding to said "People stopped caring about ulta-low latency first connect times back in the 90s.".
It seems to me that you're saying here that (1) the hyperscalers do care but (2) it's under control. I'm not necessarily arguing with (2) but as far as the hyperscalers go: (1) they drive a lot of traffic on their own (2) in many cases they care so their users don't have to.
I don't know about "valid". "Correct", maybe? "Prescient"?
>It's just that most clients don't perform local validation due to low adoption.
From your link elsewhere, https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
>We might see a day when HTTPS key pinning and the preload list is implemented across all major browsers, but we will never see these protections applied in a uniform fashion across all major runtime environments (Node.js, Java, .NET, etc.)[...]
Is this not the same flaw?
It's actually not safe for clients to perform local validation because a quite significant fraction of middleboxes and the like strip out RRSIG and the like or otherwise tamper with the records in such a way that the signatures don't validate.
No! Because it's totally possible for operating system vendors to flip that switch without requiring every upstream project to adopt key pinning. It's MUCH less infrastructure to upgrade.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
You claim in a sibling comment that you have engaged with my points, yet when I talk to you about it you just shut down the conversation.
You really aren't going to respond to any of those points? You stand by your complaint DNSSEC being "government controlled PKI" when TLDs are a government controlled naming system? And your alternative is to advocate for privately owned PKI run by companies with no accountability that are also much more vulnerable to attack?
Campaigning against cryptographically signing DNS records is a weird life choice man.
You're on tilt. It's fine that we disagree about DNSSEC. You seem very angry that you? (it was you, I gather?) wrote a post disagreeing with my post, and I didn't go back and revise my post to capture all the arguments you had that I disagreed with. Sorry, but not sorry. This is just crudding up the thread now though.
If I've said something in this thread that you disagree with, say so and say why (you'll need something better than "I wrote about this 11 years ago and you weren't nice enough to me about it"). Right now, all you're doing is yelling about a post I wrote 11 years ago and haven't cited once on this thread.
Of course, as you know, I stand by that post. But it's not germane to the thread.
> You're on tilt.
I'm upset that your incorrect arguments have gotten so much traction that the internet is a less safe place for it.
> wrote a post disagreeing with my post, and I didn't go back and revise my post to capture all the arguments you had that I disagreed with. Sorry, but not sorry.
You in a sibling thread:
> I feel pretty confident that the search bar refutes this claim you're making. What you're trying to argue is that I've avoided opportunities to argue about DNSSEC on HN. Seems... unlikely.
It seemed like you wanted to have this discussion but I guess not.
> yelling about a post I wrote 11 years ago and haven't cited once on this thread. ... Of course, as you know, I stand by that post. But it's not germane to the thread.
Do you know what comment thread you are in? I complained about FUD and cited your blogpost. This is what this thread is about.
Have you considered that telling me how influential my writing on this topic has been is not a great way to get me to stop writing?
DNSSEC adoption always felt like one of those things everyone agrees is important but operational complexity slows it down in practice.
It is absolutely not true that everybody agrees DNSSEC adoption is important. Much of the failure of DNSSEC adoption is operators believing it's not important.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to design a new, simple API and glue for doing secure DNS lookups just for certificate issuance? It could look more like dnscurve or even like HTTPS: have a new resource, say NSS, in parallel with NS. To securely traverse to a subdomain, you would query the parent for NSS and, if the record is present, you would learn an IP address and a public key hash or certificate hash that you can query via HTTPS to read the next domain. And this whole spec would say that normal HTTPS clients and OS resolvers SHOULD NOT use it. So if you mess it up, your site doesn’t go offline.
(HTTPS really needs a way to make a URL where the URL itself encodes the keying information.)
Yes. WebPKI people have been talking about doing that for a long time. There's a couple different angles you can come up with on it, including things like RDAP to directly query registrars for ownership of a domain, and speaking DoH all the way up to authorities.
Presumably the problem is that it just takes for-fucking-ever to make anything happen inside CA/BForum. Case in point: we were all today years old before CA/BForum required CAs to actually use DNSSEC if it's set up.