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ivanr | 11 months ago

Those two don't really compete. DNSSEC provides authenticity/integrity without privacy and DoH does exactly the opposite. If anything, you need both in order to secure DNS.

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tptacek|11 months ago

They don't compete in any immediate way, but over the long term, end-to-end DNS secure transport would cut sharply into the rationale for deploying DNSSEC. We're not there yet (though: I don't think DNSSEC is a justifiable deployment lift regardless).

It's worth keeping in mind that the largest cause of DNS authoritative data corruption isn't the DNS protocol at all, but rather registrar phishing.

Honestly, and I think this has been true for a long time, but in 2025 the primary (perhaps sole) use case for DNSSEC is as a trust anchor for X.509 certificate issuance. If that's all you need, you can get that without a forklift upgrade of the DNS. I don't think global DNSSEC is going to happen.

ivanr|11 months ago

In what way does DoH provide end-to-end security? It doesn't, unless you adopt a different definition of "end-to-end" where the "server end" is an entity that's different from the domain name owner, but you're somehow trusting it to serve the correct/unaltered DNS entries. And even then, they can be tricked/coerced/whatever into serving unauthentic information.

For true end-to-end DNS security (as in authentication of domain owners), our only option is DNSSEC.

At best, you can argue that DoH solves a bigger problem.