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DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

status.denic.de

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Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#202

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.

>So a single configuration mistake in a single place wiped out external reachability of a major economy.

And fuck nothing at all happened as a result.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#203

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.

Normally it should not have been, with cache and all, but that was the past...

Think about what would happen the day that letsencrypt is borken for whatever reason technical or like having a retarded US leader and being located in the wrong country. Taken into account the push of letsencrypt with major web browsers to restrict certificate validities for short periods like only a few days...

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#205

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.

It is indeed a bit sad that Cloudflare had to turn off DNSSEC completely. But I completely understand that they don't have a production-ready, tested path to override DNSSEC validation for only some domains.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesn't this event speak for itself though?

Kind-of. But there are worse things than outages when it's PKIs we're talking about. DNSSEC is also extremely opaque and unmonitored. Any compromise will not be noticed. Nor will anyone have any recourse against misbehaving roots. Fun fact, CloudFlare has used the same KSK for zones it serves more than a decade now.

Which is fine. Not because KSK rollover is supposedly complicated, but if you can't manage to keep your private keys and PKI safe in the first place then key rotation is just a security circus trick. But if you do know how to keep them safe, then...

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#208

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 am reminded of the warning that zonemaster gives about putting your domain name servers on a single AS, as is common practice for many larger providers. A lot of people do not want others to see this as a problem since a single AS is a convenient configuration for routing, but it has the downside of being a single point of failure.

Building redundant infrastructure that can withstand BGP and DNS configuration mistakes are not that simple but it can be done.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#209

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.

Sobriety is just factor to be weighed in an emergency situation. 30 years ago I was at a ski resort with about 50 friends having a drinking competition in the resort's main bar. Late that night two ski lodges collapsed, trapping people inside. Around midnight, soon after the winner was announced, the police entered and asked "who's able to drive a crane truck?" The winner of the competition put his hand up and informed them of how much he had had to drink. Don't care they said, so he drove a crane big enough to lift a building up a single lane 35km mountain road in nighttime ice conditions. (The crane made it, but sadly most of the people in the ski lodges didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Thredbo_landslide )

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#210

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 trick to asn.1 is to generate both parser and serializer from the spec. Elliptic curve math on the other hand is ... yeah, you need to know the math and also know the tricks to code that implements it. Both of those have steep learning curve, but it's hardly because it's a mess or it's old.
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