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Witness the security of this fully DNSSEC-enabled zone!

Posted: Sun, 6 July 2014 | permalink | No comments

After dealing with the client side of the DNSSEC puzzle last week, I thought it behooved me to also go about getting DNSSEC going on the domains I run DNS for. Like the resolver configuration, the server side work is straightforward enough once you know how, but boy howdy are there some landmines to be aware of.

One thing that made my job a little less ordinary is that I use and love tinydns. It’s an amazingly small and simple authoritative DNS server, strong in the Unix tradition of “do one thing and do it well”. Unfortunately, DNSSEC is anything but “small and simple” and so tinydns doesn’t support DNSSEC out of the box. However, Peter Conrad has produced a patch for tinydns to do DNSSEC, and that does the trick very nicely.

A brief aside about tinydns and DNSSEC, if I may… Poor key security is probably the single biggest compromise vector for crypto. So you want to keep your keys secure. A great way to keep keys secure is to not put them on machines that run public-facing network services (like DNS servers). So, you want to keep your keys away from your public DNS servers. A really great way of doing that would be to have all of your DNS records somewhere out of the way, and when they change regenerate the zone file, re-sign it, and push it out to all your DNS servers. That happens to be exactly how tinydns works. I happen to think that tinydns fits very nicely into a DNSSEC-enabled world. Anyway, back to the story.

Once I’d patched the tinydns source and built updated packages, it was time to start DNSSEC-enabling zones. This breaks down into a few simple steps:

1. Generate a key for each zone. This will produce a private key (which, as the name suggests, you should keep to yourself), a public key in a DNSKEY DNS record, and a DS DNS record. More on those in a minute.

   One thing to be wary of, if you’re like me and don’t want or need separate “Key Signing” and “Zone Signing” keys. You must generate a “Key Signing” key – this is a key with a “flags” value of 257. Doing this wrong will result in all sorts of odd-ball problems. I wanted to just sign zones, so I generated a “Zone Signing” key, which has a “flags” value of 256. Big mistake.

   Also, the DS record is a hash of everything in the DNSKEY record, so don’t just think you can change the 256 to a 257 and everything will still work. It won’t.

2. Add the key records to the zone data. For tinydns, this is just a matter of copying the zone records from the generated key into the zone file itself, and adding an extra pseudo record (it’s all covered in the tinydnssec howto).

3. Publish the zone data. Reload your BIND config, run tinydns-sign and tinydns-data then rsync, or do whatever it is PowerDNS people do (kick the database until replication starts working again?).

4. Test everything. I found the Verisign Labs DNSSEC Debugger to be very helpful. You want ticks everywhere except for where it’s looking for DS records for your zone in the higher-level zone. If there are any other freak-outs, you’ll want to fix those – because broken DNSSEC will take your domain off the Internet in no time.

5. Tell the world about your DNSSEC keys. This is simply a matter of giving your DS record to your domain registrar, for them to add it to the zone data for your domain’s parent. Wherever you’d normally go to edit the nameservers or contact details for your domain, you probably want to do to the same place and look for something about “DS” or “Domain Signer” records. Copy and paste the details from the DS record in your zone into there, submit, and wait a minute or two for the records to get published.

6. Test again. Before you pat yourself on the back, make sure you’ve got a full board of green ticks in the DNSSEC Debugger. if anything’s wrong, you want to rollback immediately, because broken DNSSEC means that anyone using a DNSSEC-enabled resolver just lost the ability to see your domain.

That’s it! There’s a lot of complicated crypto going on behind the scenes, and DNSSEC seems to revel in the number of acronyms and concepts that it introduces, but the actual execution of DNSSEC-enabling your domains is quite straightforward.