[theamk]

The important stuff is not just websites I host, but also websites I visit. And in all the scenarios you mention, I (and everyone else) would know that it happened very clearly, as it is basically denial of service attack. Even if this is a takeover event with almost-instantaneous replacement with the phishing page, the website owner would detect this and if the website is at least a bit popular, the news would definitely hit the HN top page :)

For an example, sr.ht is hosted by Haitian TLD but has Let's Encrypt CA. Thanks to CT logs, I trust that the connections are secure, and when I download software from it I am getting it from the rightful place. (Or not getting this at all because website is down. That's a nature of the web, things break)

But with DNSSEC? No assurances at all. Owner of .ha can be coerced or bribed by $(your least favorite nation) and this may never be detected, especially if this is a targeted attack to specific addresses. And even if detected, there will _still_ be people saying, "hopefully this does not affect me, I won't move domains and risk my search traffic".

And that's the reason that DNSSEC scares me and WebPKI does not.

[tialaramex]

Web PKI CAs aren't psychic, they just use DNS. So your claim ends up being that you believe DNS answers from the DNS can be tampered with by parties who control those answers (which includes the TLD registrar, this part checks out), but, somehow every Web PKI CA would know if this happened and disregard the results.

Not only is your claim obviously not true in principle, we know it's not true in practice, disrupted DNS causes real issuances which are let's say... suspicious. They're not mis-issuance under current policy because the Web PKI trusts the DNS, but they would trigger exactly the scenario you believe can't happen.

[nickf]

You're right of course, but there's progress being made to require multi-perspective verification (do DNS lookups from many different and ideally randomised locations, only issue if you get consensus). It's not perfect, but it's a great step in the right direction.

[yencabulator]

DNSSEC can be tampered without leaving a trail of evidence. If you MitM DNS for all the outbound IPs a CA uses, the end result of that gets logged in Certificate Transparency. And since 1) sites can and do monitor CT for their domains and 2) browsers demand the certificate has been submitted to CT, we know that e.g. google.com is not MitM'ed.