That was my experience too until I decided that just running email systems for 30 odd years when HN says that is unnatural piqued my weird or something!

I ran up three new VMs on three different sites. I linked all three systems via a private Wireguard mesh. MariaDB on each VM bound to the wg IP and stock replication from the "primary". PowerDNS runs across that lot. One of the VMs is not available from the internet and has no identity within the DNS. The idea is that if the Eye of Sauron bears down on me, I can bring another DNS server online quite quickly and fiddle the records to bring it online. It also serves as a third authority for replication.

I also deployed https://github.com/PowerDNS-Admin/PowerDNS-Admin which is getting on a bit and will be replaced eventually but works beautifully.

Now I have DNS with DNSSEC and dynamic DNS and all the rest. This is how you start signing a zone and PowerDNS will look after everything else:

  # pdnsutil secure-zone example.co.uk
  # pdnsutil zone set-nsec3 example.co.uk
  # pdnsutil zone rectify example.co.uk

My home systems are DNSSEC signed.

How simple sysadmin was in 1994 with no cryptography on any protocol. Everything could be easily MITM'd. Your credit card number would get jacked left and right in the 90s.

I know quite a bit about PKI and X.509, and I can tell you that much: the overlap with how DNSSEC works is limited.

Is that actually true, though? Even though it's not really my job, I find myself debugging certificates and keys at least once a month, and that's after automating as much as possible with certbot and cloud certificates. PKI always seems to demand attention.

It's not made easier by the fact that a lot of cryptography is either very old and arcane or it's one hell of a mess of code that doesn't make sense without reading standards.

I had the misfortune of having to dig deep into constructing ASN.1 payloads by hand [1] because that's the only thing Java speaks, and oh holy hell is this A MESS because OF COURSE there's two ways to encode a bunch of bytes (BIT STRING vs OCTET STRING) and encoding ed25519 keys uses BOTH [2].

And ed25519 is a mess in itself. The more-or-less standard implementation by orlp [3] is almost completely lacking any comments explaining what is going on where and reading the relevant RFCs alone doesn't help, it's probably only understandable by reading a 500 pages math paper.

It's almost as if cryptographers have zero interest in interested random people to join the field.

End of rant.

[1] https://github.com/msmuenchen/meshcore-packets-java/blob/mai...

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8410#appendix-A

[3] https://github.com/orlp/ed25519/tree/master