Comment by tptacek
14 hours ago
The point of rotation for these kinds of keys is that it limits the blast radius of what happens if an employee compromises such a key. This is sort of like how there are one or two die-hard PGP advocates who have come up with a whole Cinematic Universe where authenticated encryption is problematic ("it breaks error recovery! it's usually not what you want!") because mainstream PGP doesn't do it. Except here, it's that key rotation is bad, because of how often DNSSEC has failed to successfully pull off coordinated key rotations.
I can see the periodic rotations used as a way to keep up the operational experience. This is indeed a valid reason, although it needs to be weighted against the increased risk of compromise due to the rotation procedure itself.
I'm just saying that rotating the key just in case someone compromised it is not a great idea. Doubly so if it's done infrequently enough for the operational experience to atrophy between rotations.
And yeah, I fully agree that anything surrounding the DNSSEC operations is a burning trash fire. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.
I'm glad we agree about DNSSEC, but the rationale I'm giving you for key rotation is the same reason we use short-lived secrets everywhere in modern cryptosystems. It's not controversial (except among Unix systems administrators).
Oh, I never disagreed about the state of DNSSEC. It's horrible. Along with the rest of the DNS infrastructure (I just had the reason to remember the DNS haiku again today, unrelated to .de). My disagreement is that I believe that DNSSEC should be fixed, rather than abandoned. And I believe that this does not actually require all that much work.
And I just don't fully buy this rationale for asymmetric key rotation. It makes total sense for symmetric secrets (except for passwords).