Since we don't often hear dnssec positive stories, I figured I share this
sad operational outage situation with the list.

A large dutch ISP ran into issues with their Registrar (which I'm really
biting my nails not to mention by name). It caused 100's of domains to
enter the PENDINGDELETE stage. One such example is puiterwijk.org. They
have been in this state now for days.

What made things worse is that said Registrar took over the domains
and is running those zones on their DNS servers, including an MX record
that points to an actual mailserver. So if you were lucky, your email
just bounced. If unlucky, someone else got your emails. The TLS
certificate on that mail server doesn't even match their hostname,
so anyone on path can also just MITM it and a traceroute shows 26+
hops all over the place.

However, they did not modify the DS records after taking over the NS
records and MX/A records. So those domains (including the above mentioned
puiterwijk.org) are not resolving at all because the validators are
rejecting the domain supplier zones as bogus.

So, my emails to this person were not delivered to the rogue MX servers
because both he and I deployed DNSSEC.

Now, taking over MX and causing email failures like this is pretty evil.
I would hope this violates some ICANN or PIR agreement but as said
Registrar has been a sad registrar since uhm about 1995, I guess nothing
is going to change. Let's hope the Dutch ISP has learned from this and
will move to another Registrar soon after this mess gets resolved.

Paul

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