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DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

status.denic.de

191–200 of 440 posts

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

No, that actually is true, but I think (?) that the part that you were missing is that DNSSEC records are mostly the same as any other record, so they can be cached the same way. And since most resolvers are DNSSEC-enabled these days, they'll tend to request (and therefore cache) the DNSSEC records at the same time as the regular records.

There are tons of edge cases here, but it should hopefully be pretty rare for a cache to have a current A/AAAA record and stale/missing DNSSEC records.

> the DNSSEC verification is also "cached"

Technically the verification itself isn't cached, but since verification only depends on the chain of DNSSEC records, and those records are cached, it has the same effect.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#194

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.

And then fax the form to the correct authority, so that the request is Official(tm).

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#196

Cloudflare has now disabled DNSSEC validation on their 1.1.1.1 resolver: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/vjrk8c8w37lz

If it turns out the DNSSEC issue was caused by threat actors, this downstream effect could very well have been the reason to do it.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, advanced real world knowledge of public/private key PKIs (x.509 or other), things like root CAs, are a fairly esoteric and very specialized field of study. There's people whose regular day jobs are nothing but doing stuff with PKI infrastructure and their depth of knowledge on many other non-PKI subjects is probably surface level only.

It's not made easier by the fact that a lot of cryptography is either very old and arcane or it's one hell of a mess of code that doesn't make sense without reading standards. I had the misfortune of having to dig deep into constructing ASN.1 payloads by hand [1] because that's the only thing Java speaks, and oh holy hell is this A MESS because OF COURSE there's two ways to encode a bunch of bytes (BIT STRING vs OCTE…

X.509 is a deep legacy, but at least at this point it's well tested.

> because that's the only thing Java speaks

No, it most definitely is not. You can just construct a private key directly in BouncyCastle: https://downloads.bouncycastle.org/java/docs/bcprov-jdk18on-...

I'm 100% certain that you also can do that with raw java.security. I did that about 15 years ago with raw RSA/EC keys. You can just directly specify the private exponent for RSA (as a bigint!) or the curve point for EC.

Ditto for ed25519, you can just take the canonical implementation from DJB. And you really really shouldn't do that anyway, please just use OpenSSL or another similar major crypto library.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, advanced real world knowledge of public/private key PKIs (x.509 or other), things like root CAs, are a fairly esoteric and very specialized field of study. There's people whose regular day jobs are nothing but doing stuff with PKI infrastructure and their depth of knowledge on many other non-PKI subjects is probably surface level only.

It's not made easier by the fact that a lot of cryptography is either very old and arcane or it's one hell of a mess of code that doesn't make sense without reading standards. I had the misfortune of having to dig deep into constructing ASN.1 payloads by hand [1] because that's the only thing Java speaks, and oh holy hell is this A MESS because OF COURSE there's two ways to encode a bunch of bytes (BIT STRING vs OCTE…

The typical vector for entering cryptography as a professional is called "grad school".

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#200

Apparently the DENIC team was on a party this evening! Party hard, but not too hard. https://bsky.app/profile/denic.de/post/3ml4r2lvcjg2h

Interesting "bus problem" to have in a scenario where everyone who is qualified, experienced and trusted enough to commit lives changes (or perform a revert, undo results of a botched maintenance, etc) in an emergency situation is not completely sober.

Sounds like Europe, yes.
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