5 ms·

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

by dc396 6mo ago

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.

tptacek 6mo ago
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.
- indolering 6mo ago
  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.
  - tptacek 6mo ago
    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.
    - indolering 6mo ago
      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/ https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
      - tptacek 6mo ago
        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.
        indolering 6mo ago
        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.
        tptacek 6mo ago
        Did you write the article?
        indolering 6mo ago
        Yup.
        tptacek 6mo ago
        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.
- tialaramex 6mo ago
  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.
  - staticassertion 6mo ago
    > Actually I think it probably is suspicious to have the exact same opinion after studying something over a long period of time. This seems really odd, probably fundamentally incorrect. "Believing something over time means it is less likely that you are engaging in good faith"? Totally insane take.
    - tialaramex 6mo ago
      On the contrary it's suspicious if I happened to guess exactly right with much less data and so have the same conclusion after learning more. I suggest that the more likely reason is that I didn't learn anything at all.
      - staticassertion 6mo ago
        > On the contrary it's suspicious if I happened to guess exactly right with much less data and so have the same conclusion after learning more. No it isn't? If I guess what time it is and then look and see that it's around sunset, which is evidence towards my initial guess being right, it is not "suspicious". This is just a fundamentally broken model of evidence.
- cyberax 6mo ago
  > 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.
  - tptacek 6mo ago
    Explain the "wormable attack" DNSSEC addresses? I feel pretty well read into wormability, having done a product in the space.
    - cyberax 6mo ago
      The vast majority of Let's Encrypt installations don't use CAA records or anything in DNS. Or they host the DNS along with the HTTPS servers. So if the router between the web server and the Internet is compromised, it can just get trusted certs for all the HTTPS traffic going through it, enabling transparent MITM to inject its payload.
      - tptacek 6mo ago
        "The web server"? Which web server? Are the HTTP flows with executable content going to the web server or coming from it? I'm sorry, you haven't really cleared this up.
        cyberax 6mo ago
        Any web server. Just imagine a worm getting onto a company's router and starting to transparently MITM traffic. Jabber.ru experienced such an attack, apparently.
      - gzread 6mo ago
        This happened: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/ https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
- gucci-on-fleek 6mo ago
  > 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. DNSSEC is great for super tiny sites. I only run a single server, but it's strongly recommended that every domain has at least two independent nameservers, ideally with anycasted IPs. DNSSEC lets me fully self-host my DNS, while also letting me add secondary mirrors to get the additional independent nameservers. Of course, you can add secondary mirrors without DNSSEC (and this is still quite common), but DNSSEC means that I don't have to trust these mirrors [0], since DNSSEC means that they can't forge invalid responses without my private key. I'd almost argue that if you're using secondary mirrors without DNSSEC enabled, then you're not "really" self-hosting, since you're completely reliant on the third-party mirrors being trustworthy. For larger sites that can afford multiple independent nameservers or for anyone who wants to use a hosted DNS service, then DNSSEC probably offers fewer benefits, since in those cases you're presumably able to trust all your nameservers. [0]: Well, I still need to trust them a little bit for non-DNSSEC-supporting clients, but most of the major resolvers support DNSSEC these days. And even then, this makes an attack much more detectable than it would be otherwise.
throwway120385 6mo ago
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.
- tptacek 6mo ago
  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.
  - indolering 6mo ago
    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.
    - growse 6mo ago
      > 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.
      - indolering 6mo ago
bawolff 6mo ago
Its not like its just tptacek with this take, i would say its the majority view in the industry.
- indolering 6mo ago
  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.
  - bawolff 6mo ago
    > 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 $$$$.
    - indolering 6mo ago
      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!
      - tptacek 6mo ago
        Yes, the whole point of LetsEncrypt was to prevent that from happening again, and it now dominates the market.
      - ekr____ 6mo ago
        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.

by dc396 6mo ago

tptacek 6mo ago

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.

indolering 6mo ago
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.
- tptacek 6mo ago
  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.
  - indolering 6mo ago
    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/ https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
    - tptacek 6mo ago
      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.
      - indolering 6mo ago
        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.
        tptacek 6mo ago
        Did you write the article?
        indolering 6mo ago
        Yup.
        tptacek 6mo ago
        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.
tialaramex 6mo ago
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.
- staticassertion 6mo ago
  > Actually I think it probably is suspicious to have the exact same opinion after studying something over a long period of time. This seems really odd, probably fundamentally incorrect. "Believing something over time means it is less likely that you are engaging in good faith"? Totally insane take.
  - tialaramex 6mo ago
    On the contrary it's suspicious if I happened to guess exactly right with much less data and so have the same conclusion after learning more. I suggest that the more likely reason is that I didn't learn anything at all.
    - staticassertion 6mo ago
      > On the contrary it's suspicious if I happened to guess exactly right with much less data and so have the same conclusion after learning more. No it isn't? If I guess what time it is and then look and see that it's around sunset, which is evidence towards my initial guess being right, it is not "suspicious". This is just a fundamentally broken model of evidence.
cyberax 6mo ago
> 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.
- tptacek 6mo ago
  Explain the "wormable attack" DNSSEC addresses? I feel pretty well read into wormability, having done a product in the space.
  - cyberax 6mo ago
    The vast majority of Let's Encrypt installations don't use CAA records or anything in DNS. Or they host the DNS along with the HTTPS servers. So if the router between the web server and the Internet is compromised, it can just get trusted certs for all the HTTPS traffic going through it, enabling transparent MITM to inject its payload.
    - tptacek 6mo ago
      "The web server"? Which web server? Are the HTTP flows with executable content going to the web server or coming from it? I'm sorry, you haven't really cleared this up.
      - cyberax 6mo ago
        Any web server. Just imagine a worm getting onto a company's router and starting to transparently MITM traffic. Jabber.ru experienced such an attack, apparently.
    - gzread 6mo ago
      This happened: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/ https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
gucci-on-fleek 6mo ago
> 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. DNSSEC is great for super tiny sites. I only run a single server, but it's strongly recommended that every domain has at least two independent nameservers, ideally with anycasted IPs. DNSSEC lets me fully self-host my DNS, while also letting me add secondary mirrors to get the additional independent nameservers. Of course, you can add secondary mirrors without DNSSEC (and this is still quite common), but DNSSEC means that I don't have to trust these mirrors [0], since DNSSEC means that they can't forge invalid responses without my private key. I'd almost argue that if you're using secondary mirrors without DNSSEC enabled, then you're not "really" self-hosting, since you're completely reliant on the third-party mirrors being trustworthy. For larger sites that can afford multiple independent nameservers or for anyone who wants to use a hosted DNS service, then DNSSEC probably offers fewer benefits, since in those cases you're presumably able to trust all your nameservers. [0]: Well, I still need to trust them a little bit for non-DNSSEC-supporting clients, but most of the major resolvers support DNSSEC these days. And even then, this makes an attack much more detectable than it would be otherwise.

throwway120385 6mo ago

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.

tptacek 6mo ago
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.
- indolering 6mo ago
  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.
  - growse 6mo ago
    > 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.
    - indolering 6mo ago

bawolff 6mo ago

Its not like its just tptacek with this take, i would say its the majority view in the industry.

indolering 6mo ago
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.
- bawolff 6mo ago
  > 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 $$$$.
  - indolering 6mo ago
    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!
    - tptacek 6mo ago
      Yes, the whole point of LetsEncrypt was to prevent that from happening again, and it now dominates the market.
    - ekr____ 6mo ago
      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.