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by paulnpace 1488 days ago
> DNSSEC is notorious for breaking things

My understanding is that people break things.

2 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_culture

> Just culture is a concept related to systems thinking which emphasizes that mistakes are generally a product of faulty organizational cultures, rather than solely brought about by the person or persons directly involved. In a just culture, after an incident, the question asked is, "What went wrong?" rather than "Who caused the problem?".

Prominent (and very effective) example: Aviation safety.

DNSSEC is both easy to break and hard to fix. https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/

So when organizations hire people that do not understand the DNS or PKC to maintain their DNS then it is the organization's fault (rather than the person who made the change). I accept that and agree.
But if a bunch of large, well-staffed, engineering-focused, otherwise competent organizations manage to fuck it up regularly, the problem's probably above the individual organizations. Potentially with the spec itself.
I've seen far more failed certificate renewal failures than DNSSEC failures from the same teams you appear to be suggesting are perfect and the standard is flawed.
The consequences of a failed certificate renewal are much smaller than the consequences of a DNSSEC failure: if you screw up DNSSEC, your site falls off the Internet, as if it never existed.
Now you are changing the topic. I take this to mean I am correct.
There's no property of DNSSEC that makes it prone to breaking (and really any real problem on your link applies just as well to HTTPS). It just breaks because those large entities don't care about fixing it or care a big deal about breaking it on purpose.
Sure, everyone makes mistakes, but there’s still a difference between juggling rubber balls and juggling knives.
But I have seen professional knife jugglers, and none made a mistake.