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by bluejekyll 1721 days ago
I'm not going to defend DNSSEC here, because this outage and others continue to support tptacek's perspective on its usefulness.

But, some governments are requiring DNSSEC, which regardless of its usefulness, puts companies that want those contracts in a bit of a bind.

Perhaps it would make sense to split domains such that DNSSEC guarded ones would not negatively impact ones that do not have DNSSEC.

1 comments

The USG DNSSEC requirements, which seem to be a part of what happened, are fragmented and incoherent. OMB withdrew DNSSEC requirements in 2018, and CLOUD.GOV doesn't support it. But some older requirements documents still have them, and need to be updated.

The important top-line thing to know here is that virtually all tech companies eschew DNSSEC (you can verify that for yourself with `host -t ds stripe.com`; substitute any other company for Stripe.

DNSSEC-quarantine TLDs are a good idea.

If anyone else is curious about the OMB cycle, here's a pretty good explanation with links to the source memos:

https://cloud.gov/docs/compliance/domain-standards/#dnssec

The rationale in OMB memo M-18-23 for withdrawing the DNSSEC requirement in M-08-23 doesn't seem very convincing: we don't need this anymore because everyone should already have DNSSEC by now?

> M-08-23, Securing the Federal Government's Domain Name System Infrastructure (August 22, 2008)

> OMB is rescinding memorandum M-08-23, which provides additional guidance on the Domain Name System (DNS), specifically focusing on new security protections for the Federal DNS. The requirements in this memorandum are outdated; agencies already should have implemented these security protections.