HUQUE.COM has a signed delegation now

(Off topic: I've been at Verisign Labs over a month now - I'll write a separate post describing my experiences at my new job when I have more time. But the short summary is: no regrets so far; lots of interesting technical work I'm getting involved in; it was probably time for me to move on from Penn; and I think I made the right decision).

A few weeks ago, I created a set of test DNS TLSA records in my personal zone (huque.com) to help out some folks participating in the getdns-api hackathon. To correctly authenticate records in the zone, folks needed to have resolvers configured to use the ISC DLV registry, since I hadn't gotten around to setting up a secure delegation in the parent zone (.COM). This finally motivated me to get that done.

Why didn't I do this earlier? Long story, but I've used my own domain for a lot of experiments with DNSSEC configurations over the years (going back to 2007), including testing configurations that I eventually deployed in other larger, production domains. The bigger stumbling block is that the DNS registrar I was using, Network Solutions, does not support DNSSEC (specifically it provides no way for customers to transmit DNSKEY or DS record contents to the TLDs it registers domains in).

So last week, I started the process of changing to a DNSSEC capable registrar. There are a growing number of them out there, and ICANN maintains a list of them. The one I chose is GKG.net.

This was my first time switching registrars - Network Solutions has been my registrar since 1998 when I first registered the domain. At that time Network Solutions both operated the .com DNS top level domain (among others) and registered domains within it. In 2000, Verisign (where I now work) acquired Network Solutions to get into the DNS business, and in 2003 spun it off as a registrar-only business, retaining operation of the .com registry. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Network Solutions has announced no plans to support DNSSEC.

The whole process took about 5 days. On April 24th I logged into my network solutions account, unlocked my registration and requested an authorization code to transfer my domain registration. On the 25th I called them on the telephone to confirm the transfer intention and to expedite the delivery of the authorization code (it normally takes them 3 days), which I got shortly after. I then created an account at gkg.net, and initiated the domain transfer request with the supplied code. The charge was US $8.20, which included a 1-year registration period that extended beyond the current expiration date for my registration with Network Solutions. On the 28th, the transfer was successfully completed.

I then logged into the gkg.net account and used their DNSSEC interface to add a DS record for huque.com, which appeared in the .COM zone more or less immediately.

huque.com.      86400 IN DS 40924 8 2 (
                816524EB1C3B7D1315AE8330652DD17909C95DE0533C
                1F2DC023BFFEDB1F5E9B )
huque.com.      86400 IN RRSIG DS 8 2 86400 (
                20140509035959 20140502024959 56657 com.
                UkLdvaDKUcHmqAe8JQyXrxn+luWRKrkjfNzG4/xd/PXy
                zQr03L1ZXNzJHnVp7PZSau2UVfsfz5BmYGN5jepIScPc
                57zd/CnKXTZgucT9ry7dHvkdmxr+UCGY1Zg4LQ0pDyAY
                2avC9Hd2gJKBNJGWfZlGU/KHa1KvRv8fqlNWWQo= )

Below is a screen capture of their DNSSEC interface. You need to supply the parameters from your zone's DNSSEC key: the keytag, algorithm, digest type, and the digest string.

Here's a graphical view of the current chain of trust for my zone from the DNSviz tool. As you can see, there are two secure entry paths into my zone, one via the just created normal delegation path through .COM, and one via the DLV Registry at dlv.isc.org. I will be removing the DLV entries shortly.