Welp. I think can call it on DNSSEC now.

OTOH there was recently a DNSSEC-saved-the-day piece of news: https://incrypted.com/en/dns-attack-on-eth-limo-was-stopped/

That only worked because the attacker didn't understand dnssec. If they had unsigned the domain first and then hijacked it they would have succeeded.

I haven't been able to find any cases of genuine dns hijack attacks in the last few years. Would love to know if anyone else can?

Only about 40% of the crypto companies seem to use dnssec. Seems like a target rich environment.

Probably the most common reason to use DNSSEC is to check a box on a list of compliance rules. And I don't think this will change anything for people who need DNSSEC for compliance.

There's no commercial compliance regime that requires DNSSEC (FedRAMP might be the only exception --- I'm uncertain about the current state of FedRAMP DNSSEC rules --- but that makes sense given that DNSSEC is a giant key escrow scheme.)

FedRAMP requires it, although like many requirements, you may be able to get out of it if you have a good reason and/or your sponsoring agency doesn't care about it.

There are also some large businesses that require, or strongly pressure SaaS providers to use DNSSEC. You can often contest that, but if you have DNSSEC, that's one less thing to argue about in the contract.

Which businesses are those? (I ask because if they're North American, I have a pretty good sense of which large North American businesses even have DNSSEC signatures set up, and it's not many; small enough that you can easily memorize the list.)

I found another reason... MS365 require DNSSEC to be enabled if you want DANE for TLS-enforced SMTP. You could also use MTA-STS.

Probably the most common reason to use TLS is to check a box on a list of compliance rules. Is that bad?

Do browsers even load non-HTTPS sites anymore without a massive warning?

neverssl.com works fine for me, only a small warning in the place where the padlock usually is, that no-one checks anyway.

The browser would be very unhappy with an <input type="password"/> on a non-TLS site (localhost excepted). HSTS would trigger the "massive" warning and refuse to load the site, however.

It's more pronounced on desktop

Ah yes I think the HSTS issue is what I was thinking of

Yes, they do.

Yeah just ignore the big "not secure" warning in the URL bar

I just checked it. You mean the very small open padlock icon? The era of browsers warning loudly about HTTP was a decade ago, it got reversed due to pushback.

Well I checked both Chrome and Firefox on mobile and my desktop and they were all much more obvious than just an "open padlock". They both said "Not Secure" and in Firefox it was bright red text. Also in incognito mode Chrome refused to even open the site without a full screen warning. They all make it super clear non-HTTPS sites are not secure so I'm not really sure what your point is?

browsers pushed it, not compliance

I doubt it. The root cause of this was a root server misconfiguration or bug. It happened to DNSSEC records this time, which is a pain, but next time it might as well flip bits or point to wrong IP addresses instead.

Paradoxically, resolvers wouldn't have noticed the misconfiguration if it weren't for DNSSEC.

Hahaha. You wish :-p

It's a pretty hard argument to work around: WebPKI certificates should go in the DNS, and also the largest DNS providers might at any moment decide not to validate DNSSEC anymore to get through an outage.

Yes, it's a crappy outcome, but endpoints can still choose to enforce this. Further, it's not a persuasive argument against more DNSSEC usage, since if there was more DNSSEC usage then resolvers would be more reluctant to disable it.

If there's going to be a single point of failure in front of your website, that single point of failure may as well be the only single point of failure instead of having two single points of failure, and it's probably important that people can't spoof responses.

Nobody had to hack it. A system at DENIC broke, and so Cloudflare turned off DNSSEC validation for all of their users accessing .de. If DNSSEC was actually important for the security model of those users, that would be a huge deal.

If DNSSEC is part of your security model, you want local validation. Not relying on third party resolver that you don't have a contract with.

Beyond that, DNS has the AD bit. If you need DNSSEC secure data (for example for the TLSA record), then when Cloudflare turns off DNSSEC validation, the AD bit will be clear and things will stop working.

This is a non sequitur.