> TBH I am a little surprised that there have not been any large scale attacks on the DNS infrastructure, considering the fact that any sort of security was bolted on to DNS as an afterthought. DNSSEC is a step forward, but I have no clue if any resolvers and/or clients make use of it.
There have been _lots_ of large scale attacks on DNS infrastructure. DDoS against root servers, TLD servers, and well known nameservers is commonplace; occasionally with some success. Because DNS is mostly UDP, it works well with anycast, and anycast with many pops is a great way to handle traffic from a big DDoS. There's also a lot of good decisions in the protocol/general implementations that reduce the impact of outages.
DNSSEC is a bolt on intended to address response forgery, it doesn't address DDoS.
> There have been _lots_ of large scale attacks on DNS infrastructure.
Huh, I did not know that. Fascinating!
What I meant was that there have not been any disturbances that had widespread consequences; imagine that one day, out of nothing, it is impossible to get an answer for the .com zone, just for an hour or so. In my mind I see the news reporting about this the way they would report about a hurricane or earthquake. Unless a lot of their broadcasting / distribution also would be out of order. ;-)
Here's a blog entry [1] about an attack in 2016, with some references to other attacks.
The thing is, you have to maintain an attack for a long time to effectively disrupt service.
The root zone is published -- I imagine large recursive caches may use a local copy, rather than actually querying the root servers; but if they do query the root, the TTLs are 2 days; there's a pretty good chance your recursive resolver will have com. cached. The com. servers also give a 2 day TTL, so for popular domains, there's a good chance those are cached too. DDoS on the nameservers for domains can be effective, though. Even then, it's usually not a total outage.
There have been _lots_ of large scale attacks on DNS infrastructure. DDoS against root servers, TLD servers, and well known nameservers is commonplace; occasionally with some success. Because DNS is mostly UDP, it works well with anycast, and anycast with many pops is a great way to handle traffic from a big DDoS. There's also a lot of good decisions in the protocol/general implementations that reduce the impact of outages.
DNSSEC is a bolt on intended to address response forgery, it doesn't address DDoS.