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Comment by ekr____ | Hacker News Reader

> But if it's worth doing for HTTP, why not for DNS?

I'm sorry I don't understand your question.

The engineering effort! ECC solves the theoretical concerns around latency anyway yet we have people arguing that it shouldn't be done. But if it was worth making HTTPS faster to secure HTTP, why not DNS?

HTTPS solved a bunch of real world threat models that were causing massive security issues. So we collectively put a bunch of engineering time into making it performant so that we could deploy it everywhere with minimal impact on UX and performance.

DNSSEC also solves a bunch of real world threat models that do cause massive security issues. I think we should put that effort into DNS as well.

Somehow they cause these massive security issues without impacting the 95%+ of sites that haven't used the protocol since it became viable to adopt a decade and a half ago.

It's just a very difficult statistic to get around! Whenever you make a claim like this, you're going to have address the fact that basically ~every high-security organization on the Internet has chosen not to adopt the protocol, and there are basically zero stories about how this has bit any of them.

Does it?

I run a bunch of websites personally. I have ACME-issued TLS certificates from LetsEncrypt. I monitor the Certificate Transparency logs, and have CAA records set.

What's the threat model that should worry me, where DNSSEC is the right improvement?

Ah, I see what you're asking.

You're not going to find this answer satisfying, I suspect, but there are two main reasons browsers and big sites (that's what we're talking about) didn't bother to try to make DNSSEC faster:

1. They didn't think that DNSSEC did much in terms of security. I recognize you don't agree with this, but I'm just telling you what the thinking was. 2. Because there is substantial deployment of middleboxes which break DNSSEC, DNSSEC hard-fail by default is infeasible.

As a consequence, the easiest thing to do was just ignore DNSSEC.

You'll notice that they did think that encrypting DNS requests was important, as was protecting them from the local network, and so they put effort into DoH, which also had the benefit of being something you could do quickly and unilaterally.

I'm not unaware of this and I agree that WebPKI has greatly reduced global risk. New DNS tech takes a lot longer to implement but that doesn't mean we should kill DNSSEC support like the trolls insist upon!

Why would Let's Encrypt not also be interested in safeguarding DNS, SSH, BGP, and all the others? Those middle boxes will have to get replaced someday and we could push for regulation requiring that their replacements support DNSSEC. These long-term societal investments are worth making and it would enable decentralized DNS.

I'm also concerned that none of this will happen if haters won't stop screaming, "DNSSEC doesn't do anything but ackchyually harms security!".

(@tptacek: please stay out of this comment thread)

I’ve asked elsewhere what threat models DNSSEC is solving for me.

Where are all the attacks happening targeting sites that don’t use DNSSEC?

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