What are the potential adverse consequences of enabling DNSSEC?
Summary
What email marketers say10Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Email Geeks shares they've been using DNSSEC for 10 years or so, and there can be issues that are DNSSEC specific. The toolchain for management is really important and understanding how to get out of a bad spot is also important. But it's doable.
Email marketer from DNSimple discusses that if your DNS provider does not fully support DNSSEC, you might encounter compatibility issues or have limited functionality. This can lead to problems when trying to implement or manage DNSSEC for your domain.
Email marketer from Namecheap shares that incorrect DNSSEC configuration can lead to DNS resolution failures, making websites or services inaccessible. It also increases complexity in DNS management, potentially leading to more errors.
Email marketer from Ask Ubuntu shares the biggest risk is messing up the setup and effectively blackholing your domain by causing all DNS queries to fail. This is most common during initial setup or when changing DNS providers.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that a negative consequence of enabling DNSSEC is performance, as it adds an extra layer lookup. Administration also increases. Increased complexity means more opportunities for things to go wrong, but it is highly recommended as for the majority it is a simple on off switch that just works.
Email marketer from Scott Helme's Blog notes that an often overlooked consequence is the increased attack surface. While DNSSEC protects against certain attacks, misconfigurations can create new vulnerabilities if not implemented correctly and monitored
Email marketer from Reddit responds that a key risk is downtime due to misconfiguration. If you mess up the DNSSEC records, your domain can become unreachable. Also, changing DNS providers can be more complex with DNSSEC enabled, as you need to migrate the keys correctly.
Email marketer from StackOverflow points out that because DNSSEC relies on cryptography, it is important to keep keys secure. A compromised key allows an attacker to create valid signatures for malicious DNS records, bypassing the security DNSSEC is intended to provide.
Email marketer from Cloudflare Community explains that DNSSEC adds cryptographic signatures to your DNS records. If these signatures are incorrect or can't be validated, DNS resolution can fail, making your website or service unreachable. Incorrect configuration is the biggest risk.
Email marketer from ServerFault shares that one risk is the potential for increased resource consumption. DNSSEC adds computational overhead for signing and validating DNS records, which can impact DNS server performance, especially under heavy load.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Word to the Wise shares DNSSEC offers an extra later of assurance, DNSSEC by itself is not enough to protect email if the email isn't properly authenticated in other ways. In addition, there can be a performance hit as it adds overhead to DNS lookups.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that signing zones is trivial if your DNS system has good support for it, but operationally painful and risky if it doesn’t. Checking DNSSEC at the resolver means that queries just fail if the service has broken their DNSSEC. They have seen partial outages caused by both, so nothing is risk-free.
Expert from Email Geeks shares that if you can sign your zones reliably there’s not much of a downside to doing so, but there's also not much of an upside as everything you care about is probably validated by TLS anyway.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that DNSSEC adds complexity to DNS management. This complexity can lead to configuration errors that may disrupt DNS resolution, causing domains to become unreachable. Proper key management is crucial to avoid these issues.
What the documentation says5Technical articles
Documentation from NIST explains that the chain of trust in DNSSEC relies on a hierarchy of keys. If a key in this chain is compromised, it could undermine the security of all domains that rely on it, leading to widespread trust issues.
Documentation from ICANN shares that one potential issue is increased DNS response size due to the added cryptographic signatures, potentially leading to slower DNS resolution times, especially for users with poor network connections. This is more relevant for large DNS zones with many records.
Documentation from Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) details that operational complexity is a significant challenge. Maintaining DNSSEC requires careful key management, including secure generation, storage, and rollover of keys. Failure to manage keys properly can lead to service disruptions.
Documentation from Verisign explains that if DNSSEC is not implemented correctly, it can lead to validation failures, making a domain appear unavailable to users. This can happen due to incorrect key synchronization or other configuration errors.
Documentation from DNSViz suggests that debugging DNSSEC issues can be complex, requiring specialized tools and knowledge to diagnose problems. This complexity can make it difficult for administrators to resolve issues quickly, leading to prolonged outages.