That rebuttal held water 10 years ago, but fortunately we have made a lot of advancements since then.
DNSSEC was a solution trying to solve the problem of DNS security while still maintaining transparency for DNS operators to spy on queries. At the time, passive DNS was one of the tent poles of tracking malware and responding to security incidents.
We have since committed entirely to transport security in the form of DoH and friends. It solves the vast majority of problems we actually have.
DoH only secures the connection between the DoH provider and the client, not the response from the authoritative DNS server. It also isn't sufficient for DANE or similar. So DoH doesn't completely solve the problems DNSSEC tried to.
Authentication is precisely the problem DNSSEC is supposed to solve. And authentication is part of transport security.
TLS usually does provide authentication. The certificate is signed by a chain that leads up to a trusted CA, and content of the stream is authenticated using an AEAD encryption algorithm. But RFC 9539 specifically doesn't require the certificate to be signed by a CA (and recommends using a self signed cert) or the client to verify the authenticity of the certificate used by the server.
This means that an active MitM could return whatever it wanted to the recursive resolver. Pulling that off is admittedly more difficult than a MitM on a public wifi network at a coffee shop, but it's still a gap in security.
And no, you can't just use Web PKI to verify connections to authoritative DNS servers, because Web PKI relies on DNS to confirm domain ownership.
The rebuttal is old because the criticism is old. If you give more up-to-date criticism, then more modern rebuttals are available.
”DNS security” can mean many things, but DNSSEC was meant to solve the problem of verification of DNS data, while still allowing for offline signing and secondary DNS servers serving pre-signed zones, without distributing the key everywhere. DoH/DoT do not solve this; they solve different problems.
It is not surprising that European registrars have added millions of new names nobody is ever going to visit, all of them signed by default at their registrars. That's not meaningful.
Comments
That rebuttal held water 10 years ago, but fortunately we have made a lot of advancements since then.
DNSSEC was a solution trying to solve the problem of DNS security while still maintaining transparency for DNS operators to spy on queries. At the time, passive DNS was one of the tent poles of tracking malware and responding to security incidents.
We have since committed entirely to transport security in the form of DoH and friends. It solves the vast majority of problems we actually have.
DoH only secures the connection between the DoH provider and the client, not the response from the authoritative DNS server. It also isn't sufficient for DANE or similar. So DoH doesn't completely solve the problems DNSSEC tried to.
Exactly. And now there's <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9539> that allows encrypted DNS between authoritative and recursive servers as well.
That provides privacy, but not authentication.
Authentication was never the problem, transport security was.
This is why we pushed to deploy TLS everywhere instead of focusing on a scheme to PGP sign every webpage on the internet.
Authentication is precisely the problem DNSSEC is supposed to solve. And authentication is part of transport security.
TLS usually does provide authentication. The certificate is signed by a chain that leads up to a trusted CA, and content of the stream is authenticated using an AEAD encryption algorithm. But RFC 9539 specifically doesn't require the certificate to be signed by a CA (and recommends using a self signed cert) or the client to verify the authenticity of the certificate used by the server.
This means that an active MitM could return whatever it wanted to the recursive resolver. Pulling that off is admittedly more difficult than a MitM on a public wifi network at a coffee shop, but it's still a gap in security.
And no, you can't just use Web PKI to verify connections to authoritative DNS servers, because Web PKI relies on DNS to confirm domain ownership.
The rebuttal is old because the criticism is old. If you give more up-to-date criticism, then more modern rebuttals are available.
”DNS security” can mean many things, but DNSSEC was meant to solve the problem of verification of DNS data, while still allowing for offline signing and secondary DNS servers serving pre-signed zones, without distributing the key everywhere. DoH/DoT do not solve this; they solve different problems.
You don't seem to be sharing any of the modern rebuttals. I think it's telling that the old criticisms still basically stand.
You don’t seem to be giving any up-to-date criticism. I think it’s telling that the old rebuttals still basically stand.
Which of the criticisms in that article don't stand? What's changed? Adoption of DNSSEC has barely budged since I wrote it.
Which of the rebuttals in the link I gave don’t stand?
According to this graph, DNSSEC adoption seems to now be roughly 16×, i.e. 1600%, of what it was when you wrote it:
https://www.verisign.com/resources/dnssec-tools/dnssec-score...
See the comment from 'dsl upthread.
As for stats: https://dnssecmenot.fly.dev/
It is not surprising that European registrars have added millions of new names nobody is ever going to visit, all of them signed by default at their registrars. That's not meaningful.