> The same reasons not to deploy DNSSEC that face large organizations apply to you: any mistake managing your DNSSEC configuration will take your domain off the Internet (in fact, you'll probably have a harder time recovering than large orgs, who can get Google and Cloudflare on the phone).
Set your TTL to five minutes and/or hand over DNS management to a service provider.
> Meanwhile, you get none of the theoretical upside, which in 2026 comes down to making it harder for an on-path attacker to MITM other readers of your site by tricking a CA into misissuing a DCV certificate for you --- an attack that has already gotten significantly harder over the last year due to multiperspective. The reason you don't get this upside is that nobody is going to run this attack on you.
Didn't save Cloudflare from a bad TLS certificate being issued. I still think that reducing the number of bad actors from 300 to the root servers and your registrar is a meaningful reduction in attack surface.
> DNSSEC attempts to address just a subset of these; most especially MITM attacks, for which there are a huge variety of vectors, only one of which is contemplated by DNSSEC.
How would authenticating DNS records cryptographically not address cache poisoning, MITM, and DNS spoofing in relation to DNS lookups? Also, DNSSEC doesn't have to solve all problems to make it worth doing.
> Finally, I have to tediously remind you: when you're counting signed domains, it's important to keep in mind that not all zones are equally meaningful. Especially in Europe, plenty of one-off unused domains are signed, because registrars enable it automatically. The figure of merit is how many important zones are signed. Use whichever metric you like, and run in through a bash loop around `dig ds +short`. You'll find it's a low single-digit percentage.
Yet you complain about DNSSEC being to hard to deploy and not getting enough deployment. Wouldn't it be nice if they could leverage that automatic signing to also generate TLS, SSH, and other certificates?
It can be used alongside WebPKI. And as someone who is worried about other protocols, it sure would be nice if I could setup DNSSEC for my domain and have clients pick up on that automatically.
I can't even follow your argument anymore. DNSSEC is proposed as a feature to make DCV certificates more difficult to misissue. But DCV misisuance is overwhelmingly caused by registrar ATO. DNSSEC therefore can't address most DCV misissuance. And it has no other mainstream security proposition.
That is obviously not a claim you can make of the WebPKI. Your problem here is that the WebPKI is a very large superset of the security capabilities of DNSSEC. Unlike with DNSSEC, people --- millions of them --- actually rely on it.
I'll rephrase the argument to make it more clear for you: Phishing attacks are far more common than HTTP MITM, so we don't need protection against HTTP MITM. If you think this conclusion doesn't follow from this premise, then what differentiates HTTP from DNS in your mind, because you are making this argument about DNS?
Neither DNSSEC nor the WebPKI are defenses against phishing. But phishing (registrar ATO more generally) is the dominant vector through which DNS spoofing occurs, and DNSSEC solely addresses DNSSEC spoofing.
No? This is the third attempt you've made at this faulty syllogism. If we simply can't resolve enough premises to hash it out, that's fine, we don't have to try to understand each other.
HTTPS also has expiring keys that also need to be rotated. Most people outsource this to a service provider for them - as is the case with DNS. It's weird how people gripe about standard cryptography/PKI when it comes to DNSSEC but not HTTPS.
Eric Rescorla's post, linked upthread, goes into detail about why "OS's and browsers" can't easily solve this problem without breaking the Internet for materially large fractions of their users. In practice, browsers that care about DNS security just use DoH.
It's a lot like HTTP and every other early internet protocol that existed before the crypto. Everyone agrees that it's a problem but fixing all the existing infra is really hard and expensive.
> DNSSEC only protects the name lookup for a host, and TLS/HTTPS protects the entire session.
It only provides privacy, it doesn't verify that the resolver didn't tamper with the record.
>to the point where the root keys for DNSSEC could be posted on Pastebin tonight and almost nobody would have to be paged.
This would very much be a major issue and lots of people would immediately scramble to address it. The root servers are very highly audited and there is an absurd amount of protocol and oversight of the process.
Who? Outside of DNS providers, which organizations would need an emergency response to the collapse of DNSSEC security? Be specific; name one. If TLS security collapsed, I could pick a company from the Fortune 1000 at random, and they'd have an emergency response going.
I don't see any indication that DNSSEC would have been relevant there? Their assessment was that that interception (and certificate issuance) were completed by redirecting traffic for the legitimate IPs to another destination. The DNS records continued to work as expected.
> real world compromises of major sites that don't use DNSSEC?
Without any other changes to this infrastructure DNSSEC by itself wouldn't have prevented this, but it could have been combined with something else like a CAA record.
Given the large amount of sites, including popular sites, that do not have DNSSEC today, I'd expect that if this was a real risk we'd see a decent number of instances where it occurred.
And yet I see zero. Is it possible that given other mitigations (like multi-perspective validation) and given other attack vectors (like account takeover), this isn't actually a problem?
You're doing a jazz-hands thing here where you equate a breach in DNSSEC (which virtually nobody uses), to a new susceptibility in the ordinary DNS (which everybody uses), such that an attacker could spoof arbitrary DNS lookups to arbitrary CAs. Obviously the two things aren't comparable.
When you make arguments like this, or the weird SSH argument you're making across the thread, or the weird "this would be good for Wikileaks" thing you did elsewhere, you clarify how tenuous your argument is. Remember, you're in the position of arguing that 95%+ of large site operators are wrong about this, and have been for decades, and you're the one who's right. That can definitely happen! But it's an extraordinary claim and your evidence thus far is pretty terrible.
You know the funny thing about this is that I have talked, relatively recently, to one of the very few cryptographers who was an author on a DNSSEC standard, and they wouldn't work for the interview I want to do --- they're not sold enough on DNSSEC anymore.
The broader answer is: the relevant RFCs weren't authored by cryptography engineers. This was a major problem in the "old" IETF, before the cryptographers "took over" tls-wg and CFRG.
At any rate, the reason I asked in that particular place on the thread was that the preceding comment was attempting to draw a line between "sysadmins" who hate DNSSEC and the serious technologists who like it a lot.
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.
The question was "can you find me some reputable cryptographers that support your position?" which is just ad hominem and should be ignored as such, except it does indicate that the person asking it doesn't have any better argument than ad hominem.
I dont really think it is. The original person claimed that the reason dnssec was unpopular was due to FUD. I think in that context its a fair question to ask what experts think.
For it to be an ad hominem, the person has to claim that the argument is wrong because of who they are. But that is not the claim here. The claim is that their argument that dnssec hate is unjustified FUD is wrong because experts (who presumably by virtue of being experts) are not susciptible to FUD, also do not think dnssec is a good idea. Thus it is directly attacking the argument and not the person, and hence not an ad hominem.
Sorry, but I asked who's the most reputable cryptographer you can think of who publicly supports DNSSEC? I asked because we'd like to interview them on SCW.
More random complaints instead of engaging with the substantive question.
You replied to a two sentence post asking for a name. What do you expect to happen when you do that? If you want to debate the merits, reply anywhere else.
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.
DNS underlies domain authority and the validity of every connection to every domain name ultimately traces back to DNS records. The amount of infra needed to shore up HTTPS is huge and thus SSH and other protocols rely on trust-on-first-use (unless you manually hard-code public keys yourself - which doesn't happen). DNS offers a standard, delegable PKI that is available to all clients regardless of the transport protocol.
With DNSSEC, a host with control over a domain's DNS records could use that to issue verifiable public keys without having to contact a third party.
I ran into this while working on decentralized web technologies and building a parallel to WebPKI just wasn't feasible. Whereas we could totally feed clients DNSSEC validated certs, but it wasn't supported.
Thanks for the explanation. It seems like there are two cases here:
1. Things that use TLS and hence the WebPKI
2. Other things.
None of what you've written here applies to the TLS and WebPKI case, so I'm going to take it that you're not arguing that DNSSEC validation by clients provides a security improvement in that case.
That leaves us with the non-WebPKI cases like SSH. I think you've got a somewhat stronger case there, but not much of one, because those cases can also basically go back to the WebPKI, either directly, by using WebPKI-based certificates, or indirectly, by hosting fingerprints on a Web server.
> None of what you've written here applies to the TLS and WebPKI case, so I'm going to take it that you're not arguing that DNSSEC validation by clients provides a security improvement in that case.
It would benefit the likes of Wikileaks. You could do all the crypto in your basement with an HSM without involving anyone else.
> That leaves us with the non-WebPKI cases like SSH. I think you've got a somewhat stronger case there, but not much of one, because those cases can also basically go back to the WebPKI, either directly, by using WebPKI-based certificates, or indirectly, by hosting fingerprints on a Web server.
But do they? That requires adding support for another protocol.
I would like to live in a world where I don't have to copy/paste SSH keys from an AWS console just to have the piece-of-mind that my SSH connection hasn't been hijacked.
In practice, fleet operators run their own PKIs for SSH, so tying them to the DNSSEC PKI is a strict step backwards for SSH security.
There may be other applications where a global public PKI makes sense; presumably those applications will be characterized by the need to make frequent introductions between unrelated parties, which is distinctly not an attribute of the SSH problem.
And for everyone else that just wants to connect to an SSH session without having to setup PKI themselves? Tying that to the records used to find the domain seems like the obvious place to put that information to me!
DNSSEC lets you delegate a subtree in the namespace to a given public key. You can hardcode your DNSSEC signing key for clients too.
Don't get me started on how badly VPN PKI is handled....
Yes, modern fleetwide SSH PKIs all do this; what you're describing is table stakes and doesn't involve anybody delegating any part of their security to a global PKI run by other organizations.
The WebPKI and DNSSEC run global PKIs because they routinely introduce untrusting strangers to each other. That's precisely not the SSH problem. Anything you do to bring up a new physical (or virtual) involves installing trust anchors on it; if you're in that position already, it actually harms security to have it trust a global public PKI.
The arguments for things like SSHFP and SSH-via-DNSSEC are really telling. It's like arguing that code signing certificates should be in the DNS PKI.
No, we run a fleet with thousands of physicals and hundreds of thousands of virtuals, of course we don't hardcode keys in our SSH configuration. Like presumably every other large fleet operator, we solve this problem with an internal SSH CA.
Further, I haven't "moved on to another argument". Can you answer the question I just asked? If I have an existing internal PKI for my fleet, what security value is a trust relationship with DNSSEC adding? Please try to be specific, because I'm having trouble coming up with any value at all.
We also have thousands of devices accessible over SSH and we maintain our own PKI for this purpose as well. We also use mTLS with a private CA and chain of trust, for what it's worth.
Actually, does it? Yes, the obvious upside when I type in slack.com instead of 123.45.56.67 is very good. Does this same upside apply to addresses I don't type in? What's actually the advantage of addressing one of foobarcorp's infinitude of servers uasing the string "123-45-57-78.slp05.mus.foobar.com" instead of "123.45.57.78"? It seems to just waste bytes. And most communication is of the latter sort - an app talking to its own servers managed by the same company.
BGP can be hijacked. Anycast IPs exist. Rolling out a new release when one of your IPs is unavailable could be a severe challenge. SVC records are actually kinda neat.
All of that's a problem with DNS too, even updating the IP. You could still use it to get the initial entry point if you wanted. But when you serve a webpage with an automatically generated pointer to image3.yourdomain, the only reason not to make that an IP is HTTPS, and LE just started issuing IP address certificates. Think about it - it saves a few round trips.
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.
> LE isn't primarily funded by non-profits, as you can see from the sponsor list here: https://isrg.org/sponsors/
I mean, Mozilla got the ball rolling and it's still run on donations (even if they come from private actors).
> Like I said, it may be cheaper in aggregate, but I think you'd need to make that case.
The PKI is already there: we have 7 people who can do a multisig for new root keys. There is a signing ceremony in a secure bunker somewhere that gets live streamed. The HSMs and servers are already paid for. Cert transparency/monitoring is nice but now it's hard-coded to HTTPS instead of being done more generically. There's a lot of duplicated effort.
> > LE isn't primarily funded by non-profits, as you can see from the sponsor list here: https://isrg.org/sponsors/
>
> I mean, Mozilla got the ball rolling
Among others:
Let’s Encrypt was created through the merging of two simultaneous
efforts to build a fully automated certificate authority. In 2012, a
group led by Alex Halderman at the University of Michigan and
Peter Eckersley at EFF was developing a protocol for automatically
issuing and renewing certificates. Simultaneously, a team at Mozilla
led by Josh Aas and Eric Rescorla was working on creating a free
and automated certificate authority. The groups learned of each
other’s efforts and joined forces in May 2013.
...
Initially, ISRG was funded almost entirely through large dona-
tions from technology companies. In late 2014, it secured financial
commitments from Akamai, Cisco, EFF, and Mozilla, allowing the
organization to purchase equipment, secure hosting contracts, and
pay initial staff. Today, ISRG has more diverse funding sources; in
2018 it received 83% of its funding from corporate sponsors, 14%
from grants and major gifts, and 3% from individual giving.
Except for the period before the launch when Mozilla and EFF
were paying people's salaries, including mine, it was
never really the case that Let's Encrypt was primarily funded
by non-profits.
> and it's still run on donations (even if they come from private actors).
I agree, but I think it's important to be precise about what's
happening here, and like I said, it's never been the case
that LE was really funded by non-profits.
> > Like I said, it may be cheaper in aggregate, but I think you'd need to make that case.
>
> The PKI is already there: we have 7 people who can do a multisig for new root keys. There is a signing ceremony in a secure bunker somewhere that gets live streamed. The HSMs and servers are already paid for. Cert transparency/monitoring is nice but now it's hard-coded to HTTPS instead of being done more generically. There's a lot of duplicated effort.
I think this is a category error. The main operational cost for
DNSSEC is not really the root, which is comparatively low load,
but rather the distributed operations for every registry/registrar,
and server to register keys, sign domains, etc.
One way to think about this is that running a TLD with DNSSEC is
conceptually similar to operating a CA in that you have to take
in everyone's keys and sign them. It's true you don't need to
validate their domains, but that's not the expensive part. Operating
this machinery isn't free, especially when you have to handle
exceptional cases like people who screw up their domains and need
manual help to recover. Now, it's possible that it's a marginal
incremental cost, but I doubt it's zero. Upthread, you suggested
that people are already paying for this in their domain registrations,
but that just means that the TLD operator is going to have to absorb
the incremental cost.
That's fair! My primary gripe was about the need for non-profits to step in to begin with. Sorry if I didn't communicate that well.
However, I'm don't feel sorry for registrars or TLDs. Verisign selling HTTPS certs while running the root TLDs is a conflict of interest and I believe the perverse incentives are a big part of the reason why DNSSEC and DANE are stalled out. TLDs are a monopoly business and ICANN is quasi-commercial entity that should never have been a for-profit business.
I certainly think it is fair to ask them to pay for all this.
I actually agree with you that in an abstract architectural sense a DNSSEC-style solution for authenticating they keys for endpoints is better. The problem from my perspective is that for a number of reasons that we've explored elsewhere in this thread, there is no practical way to get there from here.
To put this more sharply: in the world as it presently is with ubiquitous WebPKI deployment, the marginal benefit of DNSSEC strikes me as quite modest, even if it were universally deployed. Worse yet, the incremental benefit to any specific actor of deploying DNSSEC is even lower, which makes it very hard to get to universal deployment.
> However, I'm don't feel sorry for registrars or TLDs. Verisign selling HTTPS certs while running the root TLDs is a conflict of interest and I believe the perverse incentives are a big part of the reason why DNSSEC and DANE are stalled out. TLDs are a monopoly business and ICANN is quasi-commercial entity that should never have been a for-profit business.
>
>I certainly think it is fair to ask them to pay for all this.
I also do not feel sorry for registrars. However, it's also not clear to me that if somehow they were forced to incur incremental cost X per domain name, they would not find a way to pass it onto us. With that said, I also don't think that's really why DNSSEC and DANE are stalled out; rather I think that it's the deployment incentives I mentioned above.
Note that despite the confusing naming and the fact that VeriSign was once a CA, they no longer are and have not been since 2010, as described in the second paragraph of their Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign. In fact, in my experience VeriSign is very pro-DNSSEC.
Set your TTL to five minutes and/or hand over DNS management to a service provider.
> Meanwhile, you get none of the theoretical upside, which in 2026 comes down to making it harder for an on-path attacker to MITM other readers of your site by tricking a CA into misissuing a DCV certificate for you --- an attack that has already gotten significantly harder over the last year due to multiperspective. The reason you don't get this upside is that nobody is going to run this attack on you.
Didn't save Cloudflare from a bad TLS certificate being issued. I still think that reducing the number of bad actors from 300 to the root servers and your registrar is a meaningful reduction in attack surface.
> DNSSEC attempts to address just a subset of these; most especially MITM attacks, for which there are a huge variety of vectors, only one of which is contemplated by DNSSEC.
How would authenticating DNS records cryptographically not address cache poisoning, MITM, and DNS spoofing in relation to DNS lookups? Also, DNSSEC doesn't have to solve all problems to make it worth doing.
> Finally, I have to tediously remind you: when you're counting signed domains, it's important to keep in mind that not all zones are equally meaningful. Especially in Europe, plenty of one-off unused domains are signed, because registrars enable it automatically. The figure of merit is how many important zones are signed. Use whichever metric you like, and run in through a bash loop around `dig ds +short`. You'll find it's a low single-digit percentage.
Yet you complain about DNSSEC being to hard to deploy and not getting enough deployment. Wouldn't it be nice if they could leverage that automatic signing to also generate TLS, SSH, and other certificates?
reply