DNSSEC claims another registry victim
DNSSEC is widely touted as a crucial security upgrade for the domain name system, but as so often is the case with security measures, it can also cause serious problems.
DENIC, the registry operator for Germany’s .de, became the latest victim of a DNSSEC screw-up earlier this week, when a botched key rollover led to the entire ccTLD being flagged as bogus by many ISPs.
That’s no small issue — .de is the internet’s third-largest TLD after .com and .cn, with some 17.9 million domains under management.
The company said that the outage began at 2157 UTC on Tuesday night, caused by “incorrect DNSSEC signatures” being deployed during a “routine, scheduled key rollover”, and was fixed by 0115 the following day.
Bad sigs means that any attempt to resolve a .de domain would fail, but only on networks where the DNS resolvers strictly enforce DNSSEC validation. That includes major free resolver networks such as those run by Google and Cloudflare.
The workaround is to temporarily stop enforcing DNSSEC validation, which can be done using a mechanism baked into the IETF standard. Cloudflare has a fairly comprehensive technical description of how it responded here.
DENIC said it has temporarily suspended is key rollover schedule while it figures out what went wrong.
The registry is far from alone when it comes to DNSSEC snafus. Literally dozens of ccTLDs and gTLDs have experiences outages related to the protocol since it was added to the DNS root in 2010.
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