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DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

status.denic.de

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Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you see here is decentralisation working. The issue is with the operator of the de TLD, and as such only that TLD is affected. DNS is not decentralised in such a way, that multiple organisations run the infrastructure of a TLD, those are always run by a single entity.(.com and .net are operated by Verisign) So what the issue is, that the operator has, does not change the impact.

What if the root (.) certificate breaks?

Resolvers are free to cache each TLD's keys. There's a finite, well-known list of TLDs and their keys - you can download all the root zone data from IANA: https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files (it's a few megabytes in uncompressed text form)

The world might be a little bit better with more decentralization of the root zone.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Germany, pessimistic time estimation + 1/3 and you are in a realistic time frame for the issue being resolved.

It's night. Somebody has to fill a form to approve night work first.

I know that people are joking, but of course we also have (extra paid) on call shifts.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#175
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".

Well it was already very late in the day (21-22?) so the impact was not big I would say

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#176

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 lay…

> 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.

but how would one verify the signature if the DNSKEY expired and you cannot fetch a fresh one because the organisation providing those keys is down? As far as I understood the TTL for those keys is different and for DENIC it seems to be 1h [0]. So if they are down for more than an hour and all RRSIG caches expire, DNS zones which have a higher TTL than 1h but use DNSSEC would also be down?

[0] dig RRSIG de. @8.8.8.8

de. 3600 IN RRSIG DNSKEY 8 1 3600 20260519214514 20260505201514 26755 de. [...]

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#177

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.

I have a bad feeling, that the impact will be quite severe for some services, as monitoring, performance, and security services might get disrupted. and just cleaning up is a big mess.. Worst case, some ot will experience outage and / or damage. But maybe I am just overestimating the severity of this.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#178
Things seem to be on their way up now, and https://status.denic.de/ is working again, at least from here.

DENIC's status page currently says "Frankfurt am Main, 5 May 2026 – DENIC eG is currently experiencing a disruption in its DNS service for .de domains. As a result, all DNSSEC-signed .de domains are currently affected in their reachability. The root cause of the disruption has not yet been fully identified. DENIC’s technical teams are working intensively on analysis and on restoring stable operations as quickly as possible.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#179
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or reading the latest prints about tax filings and how to conduct a compliance audit with pen and paper.

Or sweeping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehrwoche

That's a sweeping generalization.
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