deSEC – Free Secure DNS

ggurjeet about 5 hours ago 30 commentsRead Article on desec.io

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

80% Positive

Analyzed from 813 words in the discussion.

Discussion (30 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

awill•about 3 hours ago

I signed up and saw they only allowed a single subdomain for DDNS, with docs saying to contact support if you needed more. I emailed asking for just 1 more subdomain and support told me that for my usecase I should just use CloudFlare.

So I did. No silly miniscule restrictions.

boramalper•about 3 hours ago

Similar story: asked for an increase and got told

> […] our mission is to improve Internet security by increasing the adoption of DNSSEC. [We therefore expect users to enable DNSSEC for their domains.

> Would you be willing to do that?

Wanting to increase the adoption of DNSSEC is fair, but couldn’t this be all self-serve? It’s almost as if they don’t want people to use them.

8by3•about 2 hours ago

They've actually just done that, your limit automatically gets increased if all your domains are secured.

boramalper•about 2 hours ago

That’s good to know! I was actually very excited when I first found them; I was surprised that there aren’t many free/open public DNS hosting services.

zetanor•about 3 hours ago

When I last tried deSEC, the service was reliable and well worth the price of admission, but the web UI and API were both quite rough, and propagation tended to be quite slow. It was annoying to do an ACME DNS01 challenge on it, for example. IIRC, the API didn't have a complete set of replace/edit endpoints, so even DNSControl (https://github.com/DNSControl/dnscontrol) would leave records nonexistent for a while while during updates.

As an aside (though this certainly applies to deSEC) it's strange to me how so many DNS services (free or paid) struggle to import simple Bind zone files, often either giving a vague error ("one or more records could not be imported"), mangling records, or even just silently omitting records. Parsing a zone file has some gotchas, but it doesn't seem like it should be that hard.

lacoolj•39 minutes ago

Is this somehow related to the other post about another service shutting down its encrypted DNS?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568579

Weird timing?

aequitas•about 3 hours ago

Recently migrated to deSEC, great experience so far, except for hitting the API rate limit when using Tofu to plan and apply changes with around a 100 domains. For now I'm using `-parallelism=1` which seems to work.

Stitch4223•about 4 hours ago

We found deSEC to be the only affordable DNS supplier in the EU that complies with state of the art secure DNSSEC. Highly recommended.

dsl•about 3 hours ago

DNSSEC support is an anti-feature, it is dead/dying and the faster we can unburden ourselves from it the faster we can move on to better solutions.

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/

teddyh•about 1 hour ago

Rebuttal: <https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/>

apefulsin•about 2 hours ago

So DNS should be open to MITM attackers?

traceroute66•about 3 hours ago

> We found deSEC to be the only affordable DNS supplier in the EU that complies with state of the art secure DNSSEC.

I mean, if your definition of "affordable" is free, then sure.

But for the record there are other affordable EU suppliers who do DNSSEC:

    - Bunny DNS[0] is "free" – i.e. only subject to their minimum $1/month account spend fee.
    - RcodeZero is very affordable[1] plus added bonus it is run by the `.at` registry so the infrastructure is solid – business customers only, no private individuals
    - Netnod (only via resellers[2] unless you are a big company or government) – Netnod host the I Root Servers and their public hosting DNSSEC service will soon feature HSM-bound DNSSEC keys

[0] https://bunny.net/dns/ [1] https://www.rcodezero.at/solutions/enterprise [2] https://www.netnod.se/dns/find-a-partner

quicksilver03•about 2 hours ago

I happen to run an affordable EU supplier who does DNSSEC, and also AXFR (incoming and outgoing). I offer a free plan from time to time, but not at the moment to preserve resources for paying customer.

https://www.ptrdns.net/

andreaso•about 1 hour ago

Are you aware that the child zone A(AAAA) records for danube.ns.ptrdns.net differs from the parent zone A(AAA) glue records for danube.ns.ptrdns.net?

Looks like it's the glue records that point to the actual server?

amaccuish•about 2 hours ago

One who doesn't is frustratingly Hetzner.

MattTheRealOne•about 1 hour ago

I have been using deSEC for a couple of years without any issues. I mostly just do not want my DNS handled by my registrar so that I can easily transfer domains without worrying about DNS as well, and I do not like how centralized the internet is becoming around Cloudflare.

8by3•about 2 hours ago

Happy deSec user, use them for all my domains. Had quick thoughtful replies from Peter if I had any questions.

anonymousiam•about 3 hours ago

Seems legit, but how can I trust them to survive if they're not collecting revenue?

bflesch•about 3 hours ago

Some of them are located in Virginia, don't worry they'll be funded forever.

iAMkenough•about 2 hours ago

Homepage looks busted on Orion iOS. Signup form has you entering your email address within the yellow “Create Account” button.

ak4153•about 3 hours ago

Just use unbound

craftkiller•about 2 hours ago

My solution was to self-host PowerDNS and then sign up for the free DNS mirroring from hurricane electric. That way, I can administer my DNS records any way I want (these days I usually just manually edit PowerDNS's sqlite database) and if/when my PowerDNS server goes down, hurricane electric is still serving my records so the domain keeps resolving fine.

0l•about 3 hours ago

Completely different thing

thesuitonym•about 3 hours ago

What is this if not a DNS service?

pacija•about 3 hours ago

Unbound is caching, not authoritative. Zones with dns records are served from authoritative DNS servers such as bind. Unbound asks authoritative servers for records and caches them locally, giving faster response and reducing load on authoritative servers.

pacija•about 3 hours ago

Just use bind :)

bflesch•about 3 hours ago

After recent US shenanigans why would you spend effort to migrate to yet another Five Eyes controlled service, especially if they do the full "privacy from Germany" circus.

What kind of security threat does a migration to such a service actually mitigate?

If they were truly a "sovereign EU" kind of project then they'd be on .eu domain, not have security advisors from Virginia, and so on.

Nevertheless it's good to see that the decoupling-from-your-allies movement that US citizens have initiated is so scary that they have to set up these kind of fake EU alternatives with some local figureheads.

mhmdfromkarak•about 1 hour ago

do what's best.

cyberax•about 4 hours ago

Does not support AXFR :(

8organicbits•about 3 hours ago

That's a bummer.

It looks like they are open to adding the feature and open to outside contributions: https://github.com/desec-io/desec-stack/issues/579