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DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

status.denic.de

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Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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?

In theory, this shouldn't happen, because if you use the same TTLs for your DNSSEC records and your "regular" records, then if the regular records are present in the cache, the DNSSEC records will be too.

> 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?

Yes, but I'd argue that the DNSSEC records should have the same TTLs for exactly this reason. That's how my domain is set up at least:

  $ dig +nocmd +nocomments +nostats +dnssec @any.ca-servers.ca. maxchernoff.ca. DS
  ;maxchernoff.ca.                        IN      DS
  maxchernoff.ca.         86400   IN      DS      62673 15 2 487B95FEFF04265826F037C9DB2E1F14FF9ADBF2C7BE246A2B9F9BFD 481BE928
  maxchernoff.ca.         86400   IN      RRSIG   DS 13 2 86400 20260512131336 20260505104433 46762 ca. ppc9LrWniPWdAI2Xq1g3FrYJGQVYayA5TtgFRkJfqOqNfe6zu/n0gwti IO3c9pOoUpIum5gPB6GLOGbGU+sfhg==
  
  $ dig +nocmd +nocomments +nostats +dnssec @ns.maxchernoff.ca. maxchernoff.ca. DNSKEY
  ;maxchernoff.ca.                        IN      DNSKEY
  maxchernoff.ca.         86400   IN      DNSKEY  257 3 15 DYs9mPDMRx/hQ9R9iGLi1Ysx1eFdhlXeCujY6PqJWeU=
  maxchernoff.ca.         86400   IN      RRSIG   DNSKEY 15 2 86400 20260518072823 20260504055823 62673 maxchernoff.ca. RgPyEvB/kjXIvoidRNF/hfm7utzDs0kxXn4qJL17TUAVYOdbLl0Vd8zt E52bGBBFv2TNEnf9O9LkiT2GBH0jAA==
  
  $ dig +nocmd +nocomments +nostats +dnssec @ns.maxchernoff.ca. maxchernoff.ca. A
  ;maxchernoff.ca.                        IN      A
  maxchernoff.ca.         86400   IN      A       152.53.36.213
  maxchernoff.ca.         86400   IN      RRSIG   A 15 2 86400 20260518072823 20260504055823 62673 maxchernoff.ca. bRfTVHnMjCFRaIh5uc0aT1vD4yh1UZrqOZDRunLbxFI1eth6nNlTiOOC xti7axVoXwB6VAoHOAnW0nL0eeJNDQ==

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And send it by post for approval, which will take 5-30 business days.

Fax, actually! Will still take 5–30 business days for approval, for some reasons

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DNS is a centralization risk, yes. Somehow we've decided this is fine. DNSSEC isn't the only issue - your TLD's nameservers could also be offline, or censored in your country.

DNS is barely centralized. Is there an alternative global name lookup system that is less centralized without even worse downsides?

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#185

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?

DNSSEC doesn't change the degree to which DNS is decentralized. It's always been hierarchical. In the absence of caching, every DNS query starts with a request to the root DNS servers. For foo.com or foo.de, you first need to query the root servers to determine the nameservers responsible for .com and .de. Then you contact the .com or .de servers to ask for the foo.com and foo.de nameservers. All DNSSEC does is add signatures to these responses, and adds public keys so you can authenticate responses the next level down.

A list of root nameserver IP addresses is included with every local recursive DNS resolver. The list changes, albeit slowly, over the years. With DNSSEC, this list also includes public keys of those root servers, which also rotate, slowly.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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? In theory, this shouldn't happen, because if you use the same TTLs for your DNSSEC records and your "regular" records, then if the regular records are present in the cache, the DNSSEC records will be too. > So if they are down for more than an hour and all RRSIG caches…

Thanks for explaining. I thought that once any key in the chain-of-trust of any domains DNSSEC expired the whole record went stale but turns out that was a wrong assumption. If the DNSKEY and the other records have the same TTL and the DNSSEC verification is also "cached" then that makes a lot more sense.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DNS is a centralization risk, yes. Somehow we've decided this is fine. DNSSEC isn't the only issue - your TLD's nameservers could also be offline, or censored in your country.

Not really? .com and .net are still up

If Let's Encrypt goes down, half of the Internet will become inaccessible in a week.

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