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As if DNS isn't a major contributing to A LOT of downtime. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing not investing in making deployment more seamless and less error prone.

by twelvedogs1 hours ago|

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The difference is DNS provides a fairly obvious up side

by growse3 hours ago|

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> As if DNS isn't a major contributing to A LOT of downtime. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing not investing in making deployment more seamless and less error prone.

Ah yes. Let's take something that's prone to causing service issues and strap more footguns to it.

It's not worth it, because the cost is extremely quantifiable and visible, whereas the benefits struggle to be coherent.

by indolering1 hours ago|

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The benefits are huge: there are lots of attacks that DNSSEC trivially prevents and it would help secure more than just web browsers.

by ekr____1 hours ago|

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Can you expand on this a bit, under the assumption that the traffic is using some form of transport security (e.g., TLS, SSH, etc.)?

by indolering26 minutes ago|

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DNS underlies domain authority and the validity of every connection to every domain name ultimately traces back to DNS records. The amount of infra needed to shore up HTTPS is huge and thus SSH and other protocols rely on trust-on-first-use (unless you manually hard-code public keys yourself - which doesn't happen). DNS offers a standard, delegable PKI that is available to all clients regardless of the transport protocol.

With DNSSEC, a host with control over a domain's DNS records could use that to issue verifiable public keys without having to contact a third party.

I ran into this while working on decentralized web technologies and building a parallel to WebPKI just wasn't feasible. Whereas we could totally feed clients DNSSEC validated certs, but it wasn't supported.

by ekr____17 minutes ago|

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Thanks for the explanation. It seems like there are two cases here:

1. Things that use TLS and hence the WebPKI 2. Other things.

None of what you've written here applies to the TLS and WebPKI case, so I'm going to take it that you're not arguing that DNSSEC validation by clients provides a security improvement in that case.

That leaves us with the non-WebPKI cases like SSH. I think you've got a somewhat stronger case there, but not much of one, because those cases can also basically go back to the WebPKI, either directly, by using WebPKI-based certificates, or indirectly, by hosting fingerprints on a Web server.

by tptacek9 minutes ago|

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In practice, fleet operators run their own PKIs for SSH, so tying them to the DNSSEC PKI is a strict step backwards for SSH security.

There may be other applications where a global public PKI makes sense; presumably those applications will be characterized by the need to make frequent introductions between unrelated parties, which is distinctly not an attribute of the SSH problem.