Re:DNS Drama Exposed (Dramatically)
by tptacek on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @09:24PM
(#378337)
DNSSEC is a debacle of epic proportions. It has taken over 13 years for that one standards effort to solidify to the point where it is today, which is a "secure DNS" protocol where there is still no real agreement on how to prevent arbitrary people on the Internet from dumping the contents of your zone files.
I predict, without any real evidence to back me up, that DNSSEC is DOA for a simple reason: the total Internetwide deployment of resolver libraries with a "gethostbyname()" interface; none of these libraries can handle transient or "soft" DNS security failures. SSL, a protocol that is far, far easier to deploy and manage than DNSSEC, sees transient errors so often that users are rebelling against the size of the error messages Firefox generates for them. DNSSEC transient failures kill your lookup.
I can give lots of other reasons why DNSSEC isn't going to work, but that's one you might not have thought of.
I predict, without any real evidence to back me up, that DNSSEC is DOA for a simple reason: the total Internetwide deployment of resolver libraries with a "gethostbyname()" interface; none of these libraries can handle transient or "soft" DNS security failures. SSL, a protocol that is far, far easier to deploy and manage than DNSSEC, sees transient errors so often that users are rebelling against the size of the error messages Firefox generates for them. DNSSEC transient failures kill your lookup.
I can give lots of other reasons why DNSSEC isn't going to work, but that's one you might not have thought of.