The administrator of the .ru zone explained the failure on January 30 by the “imperfection” of the software – Kommersant

The Coordination Center (CC) .RU/.РФ, which is the administrator of the corresponding top-level domains, admitted that sites in the .ru zone were unavailable yesterday, January 30, in the evening due to a failure during DNSSEC key updates. At the same time, the main reason for the failure in the CC was called “imperfection of the software used to create encryption keys.”

DNS is a protocol that allows you to match website domains with the IP addresses of the servers that host the sites. DNSSEC is a cryptographic protocol extension that allows responses to queries to be verified. During the incident, DNSSEC worked “as intended: the work of DNS servers that did not confirm the authenticity of their response was promptly blocked,” according to the statement on website CC. At the same time, the center believes that the solution “requires improvement over time” and in the future should correct detected operational errors.

The failure in the .ru zone was complicated by the fact that “a significant part of Russian providers were actually not connected to the national domain name system (NDNS).” We are talking about an alternative DNS infrastructure provided for by the law on the “sovereign RuNet”: Russian operators are required to use it under threat of a fine under Part 1 of Art. 13.44 Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation. The CC clarified to Kommersant that the TsMU SSOP GRChTs (the Roskomnadzor structure responsible for the operation of NSDI) during the failure instructed operators to switch to the national system, which then worked normally, but individual operators did not switch to it either at the beginning of the failure or after the mailing instructions: “Unfortunately, we don’t know what the reason for this is.”

Problems with access to sites on the .ru domain in Russia led to disruptions in the operation of banking mobile applications, media services and marketplace order pick-up points. Sites in the .ru zone were not opened outside the Russian Federation. A Kommersant source in the telecom industry noted that Roskomnadzor does not have direct access to the global infrastructure and could hardly cause a failure.

Read more in the Kommersant article. “Three companies will run out of control.”

Yuri Litvinenko