DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved • Hacker News Board

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#271

Post by cyberax » Wed, May 06, 2026, 1:55 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #213

cyberax wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm 100% certain that you also can do that with raw java.security. I tried that, the problem is Meshcore specific - they do their own weird shit with private and public keys [1]. Haven't figured out how to do the private key import either, because in the C source code (or in python re-implementations) Meshcore just calls directly into the raw ed25519 library to do their custom math... it's a mess. [1] https://jacks…

I'm playing with LORA/Meshcore right now (I have an nRF52840 lying around). I'm pretty sure I know how to do that, will take a look.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#272

Post by cyberax » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:05 AM UTC

Avamander wrote: post #222

daneel_w wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It is not fine. Keeping key material safe is not a boolean between "permanently safe" and "leaks immediately". Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates. For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade.

> Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates.

Nope. Key material rotation is just circus when it's done for the sake of rotation.

> For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade.

Or maybe an employee has compromised the new key that is going to be rotated in, while the old key is securely rooted in an HSM?

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#273

Post by cyberax » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:07 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #248

sgc wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My poor fellow. You wrote about how something is a bad tool for a long list of serious reasons. Then it failed spectacularly because everybody decided to depend on it anyway - exactly what you were cautioning against. But somehow you have to respond to people who think you are the one who got it wrong! As a third party the whole affair gave me a good chuckle at least ;)

Germany appears to depend on it. Virtually none of North America does. I'm pretty satisfied with how this whole thing shook out!

You're wrong. Both .com and .net are signed (`dig RRSIG com.`), and if they screw up, then all the com/net zones will become inaccessible.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#274

Post by tptacek » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #273

tptacek wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany appears to depend on it. Virtually none of North America does. I'm pretty satisfied with how this whole thing shook out!

You're wrong. Both .com and .net are signed (`dig RRSIG com.`), and if they screw up, then all the com/net zones will become inaccessible.

Virtually no zones under .com/.net are signed, which was the only point I was making. It has no adoption here.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#275

Post by tptacek » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

thayne wrote: post #263

tptacek wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welp. I think can call it on DNSSEC now.

Probably the most common reason to use DNSSEC is to check a box on a list of compliance rules. And I don't think this will change anything for people who need DNSSEC for compliance.

There's no commercial compliance regime that requires DNSSEC (FedRAMP might be the only exception --- I'm uncertain about the current state of FedRAMP DNSSEC rules --- but that makes sense given that DNSSEC is a giant key escrow scheme.)

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#276

Post by tptacek » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

pocksuppet wrote: post #269

0123456789ABCDE wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesn't this event speak for itself though?

Let's Encrypt going down isn't equivalent to a rant about how encryption was a terrible idea from the very beginning and we should all just use unencrypted traffic.

Pretty sure that rant doesn't exist.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#277

Post by pocksuppet » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

thayne wrote: post #263

tptacek wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welp. I think can call it on DNSSEC now.

Probably the most common reason to use DNSSEC is to check a box on a list of compliance rules. And I don't think this will change anything for people who need DNSSEC for compliance.

Probably the most common reason to use TLS is to check a box on a list of compliance rules. Is that bad?

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#278

Post by tptacek » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #272

Avamander wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not fine. Keeping key material safe is not a boolean between "permanently safe" and "leaks immediately". Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates. For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade.

> Keeping key material secure for more than a decade while it's in active use is vastly more complex than keeping it secure for a month, until it rotates. Nope. Key material rotation is just circus when it's done for the sake of rotation. > For all we know, some ex-employee might be walking around with that KSK, theoretically being able to use it for god knows what for an another decade. Or maybe an employee has comp…

The point of rotation for these kinds of keys is that it limits the blast radius of what happens if an employee compromises such a key. This is sort of like how there are one or two die-hard PGP advocates who have come up with a whole Cinematic Universe where authenticated encryption is problematic ("it breaks error recovery! it's usually not what you want!") because mainstream PGP doesn't do it. Except here, it's that key rotation is bad, because of how often DNSSEC has failed to successfully pull off coordinated key rotations.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#279

Post by pocksuppet » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:28 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #216

amluto wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha. You wish :-p

It's a pretty hard argument to work around: WebPKI certificates should go in the DNS, and also the largest DNS providers might at any moment decide not to validate DNSSEC anymore to get through an outage.

If there's going to be a single point of failure in front of your website, that single point of failure may as well be the only single point of failure instead of having two single points of failure, and it's probably important that people can't spoof responses.

Re: DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved

#280

Post by akerl_ » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

pocksuppet wrote: post #279

tptacek wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pretty hard argument to work around: WebPKI certificates should go in the DNS, and also the largest DNS providers might at any moment decide not to validate DNSSEC anymore to get through an outage.

If there's going to be a single point of failure in front of your website, that single point of failure may as well be the only single point of failure instead of having two single points of failure, and it's probably important that people can't spoof responses.

Nobody had to hack it. A system at DENIC broke, and so Cloudflare turned off DNSSEC validation for all of their users accessing .de. If DNSSEC was actually important for the security model of those users, that would be a huge deal.