af.mil DNSSEC Outage: 2015-06-24

Updated: June 24, 2015

Overview

This page gives some details on the af.mil DNSSEC outage on June 24, 2015. The outage was fixed by removing DNSSEC support (unsigning).

Verisign's DNSSEC Debugger

Verisign doesn't archive test results, unlike DNSViz. So here's a screenshot I took on June 24, 2015:

af.mil dnssec outage

Timeline / DNSViz

OpenDNS & Google Public DNS

OpenDNS does not support DNSSEC, instead supporting DNSCurve. Google Public DNS currently supports only DNSSEC, and thus, Google's users saw SERVFAIL for queries under af.mil during this outage.

With OpenDNS, queries succeed:

$ dig www.af.mil. @resolver1.opendns.com.

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2-P2 <<>> www.af.mil. @resolver1.opendns.com.
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 61894
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.af.mil. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.af.mil. 52 IN CNAME www.af.mil.edgesuite.net.
www.af.mil.edgesuite.net. 52 IN CNAME a499.dscb.akamai.net.
a499.dscb.akamai.net. 20 IN A 23.212.53.196
a499.dscb.akamai.net. 20 IN A 23.212.53.206

;; Query time: 45 msec
;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222)
;; WHEN: Wed Jun 24 14:58:58 2015
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 129

With Google Public DNS, with DNSSEC, queries fail:

$ dig www.af.mil. @8.8.8.8

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2-P2 <<>> www.af.mil. @8.8.8.8
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 42737
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.af.mil. IN A

;; Query time: 127 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Wed Jun 24 14:59:04 2015
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 28

dnscheck

dnscheck.labs.nic.cz archived a DNSSEC outage at 2015-06-24 15:17:51 (requires javascript).

dnscheck.iis.se reported that it "could not connect to database." However later, the following af.mil DNSSEC outages were available:

Zonemaster

Zonemaster (also run by iis.se) was also having trouble, but finally decided to archive this af.mil DNSSEC outage.

Logfile examples