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by belorn 1666 days ago
"It turned out that some resolvers become more strict when DNSSEC signing is enabled at the authoritative name servers, even while signing was not enabled at the root name servers (i.e. before DS records were published to COM nameservers). This strict DNS spec enforcement will reject a CNAME record at the apex of a zone (as per RFC-2181), including the APEX of a sub-delegated subdomain"

Slack's second attempt wasn't a DNSSEC problem. Slack depended on a permissive fallback of revolvers when encountering a plain DNS protocol error. It is similar to how some websites in the past relied on permissive browsers implementation when facing broken HTML/JS/CSS. Slack fixed their broken DNS as a result of this.

Slack's third attempt was not the fault of Slack but rather a software bug at Amazon. I would make the argument that Amazon's primary product isn't DNS services, but they did fixed their bug after this.

The general conclusion I get from the article is not that DNSSEC is broken, nor that is too complicated. It is that when doing changes with your core infrastructure to make it more secure, bugs that may have been laying dormant might pop up and bite. I am sure some people has had that experience in domains outside of DNS.

1 comments

You are not wrong, but by steering clear of DNSSEC, Slack would not have had the outage they did.

What one can't ignore is the underlying chicken-and-egg problem that DNSSEC must overcome: Not many DNSSEC deployments and hence not much of it has been tested in the real-world, which results in colossal outages despite the attention of some of the most qualified engs, including the ones running one of the largest nameserver deployments in the world.

TLS and WebPKI has had a similar, perhaps even more painful route to ubiquity. So, this problem isn't unique to DNSSEC. What isn't working in DNSSEC's favour is, the world has not just moved on, but it has built solutions atop DNS' weaknesses, like it once did with IPv4 and NAT. Internet's strong network-effects coupled with its heterogeneity, make battling "the System" an even harder proposition.

See also: System design explains the world: Vol 1, https://apenwarr.ca/log/20201227