alt Hacker News> There's ample evidence that the cost/benefit math simply doesn't work out for DNSSEC.
Why? What is the real difference between DNSSEC and HTTPS?
I'd argue that the only difference is that browser vendors care about protecting against MITM on the client side. They're fine with MITM on the server side or with (potentially state-sponsored) BGP prefix hijacks. And I'm not fine with that personally.
> Where you'll see viscerally negative takes from me is on attempts to take the current gravely flawed design --- offline signers+authenticated denial --- as a basis for those new solutions.
Yes, I agree with that. In particular, NSEC3 was a huge mistake, along with the complexity it added.
I think that we should have stuck with NSEC for the cases where enumeration is OK or with a "black lies"-like approach and online signing. It's also ironic because now many companies proactively publish all their internal names in the CT logs, so attackers don't even need to interact with the target's DNS to find out all its internal names.
> In fact, it's failed more comprehensively than any IETF technology ever attempted: DNSSEC dates back into the early-mid 1990s. It's long past time to cut bait.
I would say that IPv6 failed even more. It's also unfair to say that DNSSEC dates back to the 90-s, the root zone was signed only in 2008.
The good news is that DNSSEC can be improved a lot by just deprecating bad practices. And this will improve DNS robustness in general, regardless of DNSSEC use.
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Seriously? I'll give you two differences right off the bat:
1. DNSSEC only protects the name lookup for a host, and TLS/HTTPS protects the entire session.
2. People actually rely on TLS/HTTPS, and nobody relies on DNSSEC, to the point where the root keys for DNSSEC could be posted on Pastebin tonight and almost nobody would have to be paged. If the private key for a CA in any mainstream browser root program got published that way, it would be all hands on deck across the whole industry.
> I'd argue that the only difference is that browser vendors care about protecting against MITM on the client side. They're fine with MITM on the server side or with (potentially state-sponsored) BGP prefix hijacks. And I'm not fine with that personally.
Speaking as someone who was formerly responsible for deciding what a browser vendor cared about in this area, I don't think this is quite accurate. What browser vendors care about is that the traffic is securely conveyed to and from the server that the origin wanted it to be conveyed to. So yes, they definitely do care about active attack between the client and the server, but that's not the only thing.
To take the two examples you cite, they do care about BGP prefix hijacks. It's not generally the browser's job to do something about it directly, but in general misissuance of all stripes is one of the motivations for Certificate Transparency, and of course the BRs now require multi-perspective validation.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean by "MITM on the server side". Perhaps you're referring to CDNs which TLS terminate and then connect to the origin? If so, you're right that browser vendors aren't trying to stop this, because it's not the business of the browser how the origin organizes its infrastructure. I would note that DNSSEC does nothing to stop this either because the whole concept is the origin wants it.