3 ms·

Ok, it's inconvenient and clumsy in ways that make it easy to shoot oneself in the foot. But that's not dangerous?

• cyberax 8mo ago
  When you shoot yourself in the foot with DNSSEC, you typically end up with a non-working setup. The biggest problem is that DNS replies are often cached, so fixes for the mistakes can take a while to propagate. With Let's Encrypt you typically can fix stuff right away if something fails.
  • tptacek 8mo ago
    When you shoot yourself in the foot with DNSSEC, your entire domain falls of the Internet, as if it had never existed in the first place. It's basically the worst possible case failure and it's happened to multiple large shops; Slack being the most notorious recent example.
    • cyberax 8mo ago
      Yes, and it'd be great if DNSSEC added an "advisory" signature level. So it can be deployed without doing a leap of faith. But let's not pretend that WebPKI is perfect. More than one large service failed at some point because of a forgotten TLS certificate renewal. And more than one service was pwned because a signing key leaked. Or a wildcard certificate turned out to be more wildcard than expected. I understand the failures of DNSSEC and DNS in general. And we need to do something about it because it's really showing signs of its age as we continue to pile on functionality onto it. I don't have an idea for a good solution for everything, but I just can't imagine us piling EVERYTHING onto WebPKI either.
      • tptacek 8mo ago
        I don't really understand most of this comment but you opened up this subthread with "Come on. It's not dangerous", and, as you're acknowledging here, it clearly is quite dangerous.
        • cyberax 8mo ago
          DNSSEC is not dangerous. Pretty much the worst thing is breakage, not an accidental compromise. It's also more secure, compared to ACME. An on-path attacker can impersonate the site operator and get credentials. DNSSEC is immune to that.
          • tptacek 8mo ago
            This is a very strange definition of "dangerous".
            • cyberax 8mo ago
              I'm mostly thinking about dangerous from the security point of view. I agree that it might not be the best from the operational point of view. DNSSEC in its current state makes DNS updates even more risky than they are, I agree with that.
              • tptacek 8mo ago
                You remember what CIA stands for, right?
                • Borealid 8mo ago
                  In order for an attacker to reduce a site's Availability via DNS they must alter the records received by resolvers. If they can do that, they can just refuse to send the records at all (or mangle them such that they are ignored). DNSSEC makes the situation no worse. It does, however, increase Integrity. For the record, the 'A' in CIA refers to resilience against some party's purposeful attempt to make something unavailable. It does not stand for Areliability or Asimplicity.
                  • akerl_ 8mo ago
                    > For the record, the 'A' in CIA refers to resilience against some party's purposeful attempt to make something unavailable. That’s pretty clearly not correct.
      • akerl_ 8mo ago
        > But let's not pretend that WebPKI is perfect. You're commenting on a post about LetsEncrypt working with other entities in the industry to make improvements to WebPKI. It's safe to say that nobody's claiming it's perfect. But you can't go from ~"WebPKI isn't perfect" and ~"DNSSEC/DANE exist" and draw a magic path where using DNSSEC or DANE is actually a good thing for people to roll out. They'd need to be actually a good fit, and for DANE we have direct evidence that it isn't: a rollout was attempted and it was walked back due to multiple issues.