Live data from Hacker News

DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

status.denic.de

151–160 of 440 posts

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#151
On Monday there was a huge outage affecting several cities quite close to Frankfurt because someone cut major fiber line; today DENIC is having a party and right when everyone is drunk this happens because some post-rotation task cannot be completed.

There are too many coincidences happening.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#153

https://status.denic.de/ says "Partial Service Disruption" for DNS Nameservice now. EDIT: it says "Service Disruption" now

Even when every site in the world’s 3rd biggest economy goes down it’s still just a ‘Partial’ service disruption :D

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#154

I have never used DNSSEC and never really bothered implementing it, but do I understand it correctly that we took the decentralized platform DNS was and added a single-point-of-failure certificate layer on top of it which now breaks because the central organisation managing this certificate has an outage taking basically all domains with them?

> which now breaks because the central organisation managing this certificate has an outage

The ".de" TLD is inherently managed by a single organization, and things wouldn't be much better if its nameservers went down. Some of the records would be cached by downstream resolvers, but not all of them, and not for very long.

> we took the decentralized platform DNS was and added a single-point-of-failure certificate layer on top of it

DNSSEC actually makes DNS more decentralized: without DNSSEC, the only way to guarantee a trustworthy response is to directly ask the authoritative nameservers. But with DNSSEC, you can query third-party caching resolvers and still be able to trust the response because only a legitimate answer will have a valid signature.

Similarly, without DNSSEC, a domain owner needs to absolutely trust its authoritative nameservers, since they can trivially forge trusted results. But with DNSSEC, you don't need to trust your authoritative nameservers nearly as much [0], meaning that you can safely host some of them with third-parties.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409728

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#156
post #82

Crazy. I can't remember an incident like this ever happened before and it's still not fixed? .de is probably the most important unrestricted domain after .com from an economical perspective. Millions of businesses are "down".

Germany isn't as big as you think.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#158
post #82

Crazy. I can't remember an incident like this ever happened before and it's still not fixed? .de is probably the most important unrestricted domain after .com from an economical perspective. Millions of businesses are "down".

Germany isn't as big as you think.

Yeah it's only the third largest economy in the world

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least all of the appropriate people were in a room together when the outage happened

Sounds like poor risk pooling. If that room crashed, we'd have nobody to fix this.

nation state actor picking right time to sabotage a tiny part of the key rotation process. on monday someone cut major fiber lines, on tuesday DENIC is failing.

maybe someone is showing off?

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#160

Looks like a DNSSEC issue, not a nameserver outage. Validating resolvers SERVFAIL on every .de name with EDE: RRSIG with malformed signature found for a0d5d1p51kijsevll74k523htmq406bk.de/nsec3 (keytag=33834) dig +cd amazon.de @8.8.8.8 works, dig amazon.de @a.nic.de works. Zone data is intact, DENIC just published an RRSIG over an NSEC3 record that doesn't validate against ZSK 33834. Every validating resolver therefor…

So a single configuration mistake in a single place wiped out external reachability of a major economy. It happened in the evening local time and should be fixable, modulo cache TTLs, by morning. This will limit the blast radius somewhat. Still, at this level, brittle infrastructure is a political risk. The internet's famous "routing around damage" isn't quite working here. Should make for an interesting post mortem.

fail-closed protocols have introduced some brittleness. A HTTP 1.0 server from 1999 probably still can service visitors today. A HTTPS/TLS 1.0 server from the same year wouldn't.
Post reply on HN