This is a long and interesting summary of a DNS operations research workshop. The "bad news" bit is just one part of it.

The "bad news" here is that the TLS dnssec-chain-extension was dropped by tls-wg. Chain-extension staples DNSSEC records to TLS handshakes, so that you don't need to do extra DNS lookups to get them. This is important because a pretty big fraction of Internet users are on networks that can't reliably look up DNSSEC records using the actual DNS protocol.

If you're hungry for the details (of course you are!), I believe they can be summed up as follows:

1. The point of dnssec-chain-extension is to enable browsers to use DANE, either as an alternative or an enhancement to the X.509 CA hierarchy.

2. That means the threat model for dnssec-chain-extension has to include attackers with valid certificates; define them out of the threat model and you've defined DANE out of having a point.

3. An attacker with a valid certificate can strip dnssec-chain-extension out of a TLS handshake.

4. So they had to reinvent certificate pinning to make dnssec-chain-extension make sense.

5. But certificate pinning is already a dead letter as a browser standard, because of operational concerns around abuse and also consequences of misconfiguration.

If you're just here for another dose of my DNSSEC snark, I will observe for you this: Geoff Huston, a giant in the Internet/DNS operations research community, concedes in this post that DANE is the whole "reason DNSSEC is worth the effort". He also believes that dnssec-chain-extension was vital to getting it deployed in browsers (I'm skeptical Google, Microsoft, or Apple were going to dip their toes in this swamp-water again, but whatever). And Huston apparently didn't notice until today that the tls-wg killed this draft last year.

If you're keeping score, the DNSSEC "stick-a-fork-in-it-ometer" is currently registering:

* The elimination of DNSSEC from macOS, Mozilla, and Chrome (in that last case accompanied by a statement about why the team doesn't believe DANE is workable).

* The success of DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS, both of which accomplish 96% of the bottom-up, fuck-DNSSEC goals of DNSCrypt (or whatever it was Dan Bernstein called it).

* The success of Certificate Transparency and, more broadly, Google's success at cracking down on CAs and getting CT deployed, which further deflates the impetus for DANE.

* LetsEncrypt (and, I guess, Amazon's Certificate Manager), which took money out of this whole contest (I don't think money was ever the big deal in the real world that IETF people thought it was, but it sure drove a lot of dumb mailing list posts).

* MTA-STS, the SMTP strict transport security system that locks down TLS between MTAs, which was standardized by all the major email providers, specifically (stated in the draft!) to avoid the need for DNSSEC, and which is now being rolled out at GMail.

* And now I guess we'll pretend that DANE in browsers was somehow on the table and that it just died. I'm just happy we agree it's not happening.

I don't think I'm quite ready to stick a fork in it, but it's getting close.

My favorite detail from this writeup, by the way, is the fact that Sweden and the Netherlands got their DNSSEC adoption by paying people to use the protocol.