DNSSEC is dying. And the lesson we learnt from its failure


  • Not considering fault tolerance.
    • Downtime must be part of security consideration. Not just AAA. Prone to downtime is a major dealbreaker for marginal security wins. Business needs always goes before security (and security is to serve biz, not to choke it to death).
    • Easy to misconfig = high operational risk = insecure
      • single point of failure on DS records -> easy to break
  • Not considering DX (Developer Experience)
    • Not scalable -> choke point on DS record -> hard to config multiple servers for the same zone
    • Not possible progressive adoption -> adoption is all-or-nothing -> high risk of downtime
  • No strong (enough) use cases
    • Marginal benefit when TLS is used; No benefit when plain-text is used = not worth the trouble
    • Insufficient for defending state sponsored attacks = not worth the trouble

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