(HTTPS really needs a way to make a URL where the URL itself encodes the keying information.)
Presumably the problem is that it just takes for-fucking-ever to make anything happen inside CA/BForum. Case in point: we were all today years old before CA/BForum required CAs to actually use DNSSEC if it's set up.
I made a mistake once and signed with wrong keys which then broke DANE. It‘s good to validate your DNSSEC (and DANE, CAA etc.) setup through external monitoring.
[1]: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/ [2]: https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
If you own and host your own domain, it's probably very easy to have your DNS provider enable DNSSEC for you, maybe just a button click. They'd sure like you to do that, because DNSSEC is itself quite complicated, and once you press that button it's much less likely that you're going to leave your provider. DNSSEC mistakes take your entire domain off the Internet, as if it had never existed.
There's a research project, started at KU Leuven, that attempts an unbiased "top N" list of most popular domains; it's called the Tranco List. For the last year or so, I've monitored the top 1000 domains on the Tranco list to see which have DNSSEC enabled. You can see that here:
There's 2 tl;dr's to this:
First, DNSSEC penetration in the top 1000 is single digits % (dropping sharply, down to 2%, as you scope down to the top 100).
Second, in a year of monitoring and recording every change in DNSSEC state on every domain in this list, I've seen just three Tranco Top 1000 domains change their DNSSEC state, and one of those changes was Canva disabling DNSSEC. (I think, as of a few weeks ago, they've re-enabled it again). Think about that: 1000 very popular domains, and just 0.3% of them thought even a second about DNSSEC.
DNSSEC is moribund.
Everyone knows "WebPKI", e.g., self-appointed "cert authorities", generally relies on DNS
With an added DNSSEC step, perhaps this is now limited to ICANN DNS only
Self-appointed "cert authorities" checking with self-appointed domainname "authority". A closed system
WebPKI works without DNSSEC, whereas DANE (a more secure WebPKI replacement) depends on a robust DNSSEC deployment.
https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/dns-security-dnssec/ https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/dns-security-dane/
From my perspective, the challenge with DNSSEC is that it just doesn't have a very good cost/benefit ratio. Once the WebPKI exists, "critical path" use of DNSSEC only offers modest value. Now, obviously, this article is about requiring CAs to check DNSSEC, which is out of the critical path and of some value, but it's not clear to me it's of enough value to get people to actually roll out DNSSEC.
On a busy site, the incurred additional load cost can bite hard.
A lot of people will leave it off for the same reasons as DoH or DoT. =3
"Government Controlled PKI!"
- Governments own the domains, you just rent them. They can kick your site off and validate their HTTPS certs regardless of DNSSEC.
"Weak Crypto!"
- 1K key sizes were fine given the threat model required cracking one in a year. They have since been increased.
"DNSSEC Doesn’t Protect Against MITM Attacks"
- DNSSEC protects against MITM attacks!
- It's just that most clients don't perform local validation due to low adoption.
- In reality, you are just making the circular argument to NOT adopt DNSSEC because adoption is low.
- There are LOTS more MITM opportunities with HTTPS. We spent a massive effort on cert transparency, yet even Cloudflare missed a rouge cert being issued.
"There are Better Alternatives to DNSSEC"
- There is no alternative to signing domain name data and you point to crypto systems that do something other than that.
- "There are better alternatives to HTTPS: E2E JS crypto with trust on first use"
- What about SSH? I guess we are doomed to run everything over HTTPS and pay dumb cert authorities for the privilege of doing so.
"Bloats record sizes"
- ECC sigs can be sent in a single packet.
- Caching makes first connect latency irrelevant.
On and on and on. These are trivially refutable but you just shut the conversation down and point out instances of downtime ... as if DNS doesn't cause a lot of downtime anyaway.
I mean, now you've brought it up, I am concerned about it - but the level of concern is somewhere between "spontaneous combustion of myself leading to exploitation of my domain DNS because my bugger-i-ded.txt instructions are rubbish" and "cosmic rays hitting all the exact right bits at the exact right time to bugger my DNS deployment when I next do one which won't be for a while because even one a year is a fast pace for me to change something."
(Plus I'm perfectly capable of taking my sites and domains offline by incompetent flubbery as it is; I don't need -more- ways to fuck things up.)
Yes, exactly.
And NTP, which is basically a dependency for DNSSEC due to validity intervals too;
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270665 :
> By assigning Decentralized Identifiers (like did:tdw or SSH-key DIDs) to individual time servers and managing their state with Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI), we can completely bypass the TLS chicken-and-egg problem where a client needs the correct time to validate a server's certificate.
> To future-proof such a protocol, we can replace heavy certificate chains with stateless hash-based signatures (SPHINCS+, XMSS^MT) paired with lightweight zkSNARKs. If a node is compromised, its identity can be instantly revoked and globally broadcast via Merkle Tree Certificates and DID micro-ledgers, entirely removing DNS from the security dependency chain.
The system described there I think could replace NTP NTS, DNS, DNSSEC, and maybe CA PKI revocation; PQ with Merkle Tree certificates
(I did a lot of the work of shipping that product in a past life. We had to fight the protocol and sometimes the implementers to beat it into something deployable. I am proud of that work from a technical point of view, but I agree DNSSEC adds little systemic value and haven’t thought about it since moving on from that project almost 10 years ago. It doesn’t look like DNSSEC itself has changed since, either.)
Then a few government sites, which have mandated it. The first hit after those is around #150.
DNS mistakes take your entire domain off the Internet, as if it had never existed.
I'm preparing a proposal to add an advisory mode for DNSSEC. This will solve a lot of operational issues with its deployment. Enabling it will not have to be a leap of faith anymore.
It seems to me like it actually solves a problem, what is the solution to "I want/need to be able to trust the DNS answer" without DNSSEC?
At least you're consistent.
You’ve clearly put a lot of effort into limiting adoption. I’d really value your thoughts on this response to your anti-DNSSEC arguments:
> - ECC sigs can be sent in a single packet.
It's 2026. If you're deploying a cryptosystem and not considering post-quantum in your analysis, you'd best have a damn good reason.
ECC signs might be small, but the world will be moving to ML-DSA-44 in the near future. That needs to be in your calculus.
It isn't that easy on AWS.
It also generally is not that easy if your domain registrar is not the same as your dns host, because it involves both parties. And some registrers don't have APIs for automatic certificate rotation, so you have to manually rotate the certs periodically.
From your link elsewhere, https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
>We might see a day when HTTPS key pinning and the preload list is implemented across all major browsers, but we will never see these protections applied in a uniform fashion across all major runtime environments (Node.js, Java, .NET, etc.)[...]
Is this not the same flaw?
You have any cryptographers that are satisfied with unauthenticated name server checks?
This isn't so much as a scary story I'm telling so much as it is an empirically observable fact; it's happened many times, to very important domains, over the last several years.
Resolvers have put in the effort to use most of the range of source ports and all of the range of request ids, as well as mixed caps, so predicting queries is difficult and blind spoofing requires an unreasonable number of packets.
Additionally, commercial DNS services tend to be well connected anycast. This means most queries can be served with a very low round trip time; reducing the spoofing window. Additionally, there's less opportunity to observe requests as they traverse fewer networks and less distance.
Generally, traffic has moved to certificate authenticated protocols. CAs are required to verify domain control from multiple locations, so an attacker asserting domain control would need to do so for the victim as well as multiple other locations in order to get a certificate issued.
Further; if we assume you plan to assert domain control by taking over or MITMing the IP of a DNS server, it seems likely you could do the same for the IP of an application server. DNSSEC doesn't help very much in that case. (DNSSEC with DANE could help in that case, but to a first approximation, nothing supports that, and there doesn't appear to be any movement towards it)
I agree with them.
I don't think I'm out on a limb suggesting that random small domains should not enable DNSSEC. There's basically zero upside to it for them. I think there's basically never a good argument to enable it, but at least large, heavily targeted sites have a colorable argument.
Register only has public material
The master is bind9, and any semi-trusted provider can be used as slave/redundency/cdn getting zonetransfers including the RRsigs
You really aren't going to respond to any of those points? You stand by your complaint DNSSEC being "government controlled PKI" when TLDs are a government controlled naming system? And your alternative is to advocate for privately owned PKI run by companies with no accountability that are also much more vulnerable to attack?
Campaigning against cryptographically signing DNS records is a weird life choice man.
DNSSEC zone signing lets one resolve records without having to directly go through trusted (ie centralizing) nameservers. (If you run your own recursive resolver this just changes the set of trusted servers to the zones' servers).
I've made this argument in the context of your poo-pooing DNSSEC before, and I don't expect you to be receptive to it this time. Rather I just really wish I could get around to writing code to demonstrate what I mean.
In particular, the long TTL of DNS records itself is a historic artifact and should be phased out. There's absolutely no reason to keep it above ~15 minutes for the leaf zones. The overhead of doing additional DNS lookups is completely negligible.
> This isn't so much as a scary story I'm telling so much as it is an empirically observable fact; it's happened many times, to very important domains, over the last several years.
So has the TLS cert expiration. And while you can (usually) click through it in browsers, it's not the case for mobile apps or for IoT/embedded devices. Or even for JS-rich webapps that use XMLHttpRequest/fetch.
And we keep making Internet more fragile with the ".well-known" subtrees that are served over TLS. It's also now trivial for me to get a certificate for most domains if I can MITM their network.
Edit: BTW, what is exactly _expiring_ in DNSSEC? I've been using the same private key on my HSM for DNSSEC signing for the last decade. You also can set up signing once, and then never touch it.
I've struggled to think of an especially unexamined example because after all they tend to sit out of conscious recall, I think the best I can do is probably that my favourite comic book character is Miracleman's daughter, Winter Moran. That's a consistent belief I've held for decades, I haven't spent a great deal of time thinking about it, but it's not entirely satisfactory and probably there is some introduced nuance, particularly when I re-examined the contrast between what Winter says about the humans to her father and what her step-sister Mist later says about them to her (human) mother because I was writing an essay during lockdown.
Why? I can see this argument for large domains that might be using things like anycast and/or geography-specific replies. But for smaller domains?
> There's basically zero upside to it for them.
It can reduce susceptibility to automated wormable attacks. Or to BGP-mediated attacks.
But there is no money in making that a solution and a TON of money in selling you BS HTTPS certs. There is a lot of people spreading FUD about it. It's a shame.
Well in cases where I have had to deal with DNSSEC, I've had to rotate the KSK annually for compliance reasons.
If I've said something in this thread that you disagree with, say so and say why (you'll need something better than "I wrote about this 11 years ago and you weren't nice enough to me about it"). Right now, all you're doing is yelling about a post I wrote 11 years ago and haven't cited once on this thread.
Of course, as you know, I stand by that post. But it's not germane to the thread.
The bigger thing here is DoH, which has very real penetration, and works for zones that don't do anything to opt-in. That's what a good design looks like: it just works without uninvolved people having to do extra stuff.
I think DNSSEC supporters, what few of them are left, are really deep into cope about what transport security is doing to the the rationale for DNSSEC deployment. There's nothing about DoH that makes it complicated to speak it to an authority server. The only reason I can see that we're not going to get that is that multi-perspective kills the value proposition of even doing that much.
There's ample evidence that the cost/benefit math simply doesn't work out for DNSSEC.
You can design new DNSSECs with different cost profiles. I think a problem you'll run into is that the cost of the problem it solves is very low, so you won't have much headroom to maneuver in. But I'm not reflexively against ground-up retakes on DNSSEC.
Where you'll see viscerally negative takes from me is on attempts to take the current gravely flawed design --- offline signers+authenticated denial --- as a basis for those new solutions. The DNSSEC we're working with now has failed in the marketplace. In fact, it's failed more comprehensively than any IETF technology ever attempted: DNSSEC dates back into the early-mid 1990s. It's long past time to cut bait.
Ah yes, because lets encrypt is rolling in the $$$$.
I'm upset that your incorrect arguments have gotten so much traction that the internet is a less safe place for it.
> wrote a post disagreeing with my post, and I didn't go back and revise my post to capture all the arguments you had that I disagreed with. Sorry, but not sorry.
You in a sibling thread:
> I feel pretty confident that the search bar refutes this claim you're making. What you're trying to argue is that I've avoided opportunities to argue about DNSSEC on HN. Seems... unlikely.
It seemed like you wanted to have this discussion but I guess not.
> yelling about a post I wrote 11 years ago and haven't cited once on this thread. ... Of course, as you know, I stand by that post. But it's not germane to the thread.
Do you know what comment thread you are in? I complained about FUD and cited your blogpost. This is what this thread is about.
Also, I worked for a DNS company. People stopped caring about ulta-low latency first connect times back in the 90s.
You are clearly very proud of your work devaluing DNSSEC. But pointing to lack of adoption doesn't make your arguments valid.
Now here is where I disagree. Just off the top of my head, how about HIP, IP multicast and PEM?
Why? What is the real difference between DNSSEC and HTTPS?
I'd argue that the only difference is that browser vendors care about protecting against MITM on the client side. They're fine with MITM on the server side or with (potentially state-sponsored) BGP prefix hijacks. And I'm not fine with that personally.
> Where you'll see viscerally negative takes from me is on attempts to take the current gravely flawed design --- offline signers+authenticated denial --- as a basis for those new solutions.
Yes, I agree with that. In particular, NSEC3 was a huge mistake, along with the complexity it added.
I think that we should have stuck with NSEC for the cases where enumeration is OK or with a "black lies"-like approach and online signing. It's also ironic because now many companies proactively publish all their internal names in the CT logs, so attackers don't even need to interact with the target's DNS to find out all its internal names.
> In fact, it's failed more comprehensively than any IETF technology ever attempted: DNSSEC dates back into the early-mid 1990s. It's long past time to cut bait.
I would say that IPv6 failed even more. It's also unfair to say that DNSSEC dates back to the 90-s, the root zone was signed only in 2008.
The good news is that DNSSEC can be improved a lot by just deprecating bad practices. And this will improve DNS robustness in general, regardless of DNSSEC use.
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.
If we're doing to defer to industry, does only the opinion of website operators matter, or do browsers and CAs matter too? Browsers and CAs tend to be pretty important and staff big security teams too.
The sad thing is that Mozilla and others have to spend millions bankrolling Let's Encrypt instead of using the free, high assurance PKI that is native to the internet!
They did? That's certainly going to be news to the people at Google, Mozilla, Cloudflare, etc. who put enormous amounts of effort into building 0-RTT into TLS 1.3 and QUIC.
1. DNSSEC only protects the name lookup for a host, and TLS/HTTPS protects the entire session.
2. People actually rely on TLS/HTTPS, and nobody relies on DNSSEC, to the point where the root keys for DNSSEC could be posted on Pastebin tonight and almost nobody would have to be paged. If the private key for a CA in any mainstream browser root program got published that way, it would be all hands on deck across the whole industry.
Multicast gets used (I think unwisely) in campus/datacenter scenarios. Interdomain multicast was a total failure, but interdomain multicast is more recent than DNSSEC.
HIP is mid-aughts, isn't it?
"More secure" begs the question "against what?", which the blog post doesn't seem to want to go into. Maybe it's secure from hidden tigers.
My favourite DNSSEC "lolwut" is about how people argue that it's something "NIST recommends", whilst at the same time the most recent major DNSSEC outage was......... time.nist.gov! (https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html)
Please don't stealth-edit your posts after I respond to them. If you need to edit, just leave a little note in your comment that you edited it.
It's of course possible that the total numbers are lower than the costs of the WebPKI -- I haven't run them -- but I don't think free is the right word.
S-HTTP was a bigger failure in absolute terms (I should know!) but it was eventually published as Experimental and the IETF never really pushed it, so I don't think you could argue it was a bigger failure overall.
So do we wait for all the stragglers? Wait for the top 500 or top 2500 to make it mandatory? Who takes financial responsibility for those that fell through the cracks?
Yes it did hit HN and you just said, "I stand by what I wrote." and then complain about buggy implementations and downtime connected to DNSSEC. As if that isn't true for all technologies, let alone /insecure/ DNS. DNS is connected to a lot of downtime because it undergirds the whole internet. Making the distributed database that delegates domain authority cryptographically secure makes everything above it more secure too.
I rebutted your arguments point-by-point. You don't update your blog post to reflect those arguments nor recent developments, like larger key sizes.
It seems to me that you're saying here that (1) the hyperscalers do care but (2) it's under control. I'm not necessarily arguing with (2) but as far as the hyperscalers go: (1) they drive a lot of traffic on their own (2) in many cases they care so their users don't have to.
(I hate to IETFsplain anything to you so think of this as me baiting you into correcting me.)
LE isn't primarily funded by non-profits, as you can see from the sponsor list here: https://isrg.org/sponsors/
Anyway, I think there's a reasonable case that it would be better to have the costs distributed the way DNSSEC does, but my point is just that it's not free. Rather, you're moving the costs around. Like I said, it may be cheaper in aggregate, but I think you'd need to make that case.
To really nerd out about it, it seems to me there are two metrics.
1. How much it failed (i.e., how low adoption was). 2. How much effort the IETF and others put into selling it.
From that perspective, I think DNSSEC is the clear winner. There are other IETF protocols that have less usage, but none that have had anywhere near the amount of thrust applied as DNSSEC.
Published 1 day ago March 15, 2026 1 min read View Markdown Other Articles
Article written by a human: Mike Cardwell
About 14 years ago I set up DNSSEC. I've been running it on all of my domains ever since, without issue. First using bind9 and then later using PowerDNS.
From today, all Certificate Authorities (CAs) must validate DNSSEC when a domain has it enabled.
So from today, when a CA looks up my CAA record to see if they are allowed to issue a cert for one of my domains, they must validate that the response they received is valid. And during the ACME dance, they have to validate those DNS records too.
I assume that all CA's had implemented this requirement prior to today, if only so they could test it before the deadline was reached. But now it is mandatory, and I expect that any evidence that they are not doing it will be treated harshly.
You might not want to learn about DNSSEC. You probably don't host your own DNS zone. There's a reasonable chance you own your own domain name though if you're here reading this. Why not go find out if your registrar supports DNSSEC for your domains? It might be a one click operation to turn it on...
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I write things people disagree with all the time. I can't recall ever having been mad that people didn't cite me for things we disagree about. Should I have expected all the people who hated coding agents to update their articles when I wrote "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts"? I didn't realize I was supposed to be complaining about that.