Known Limitations

Cascade is a hidden signer. This has implications for Before You Start.

Expectations for the alpha release

Tip

This page details what you can expect from Cascade in its alpha form. Our goal is to gather operator feedback. Please reach out to us.

  • The included functionality should work correctly for simple scenarios with correct inputs when running on setups (O/S, HSM) that we have tested on.

  • Handling of incorrect inputs, edge cases, more complex scenarios, non-default policy settings, and so on may be incomplete or incorrect. Please report any bugs you find

  • The user experience is a work-in-progress. The goal of Cascade is not only to be a correctly functioning DNSSEC signer which makes it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing, it should also be obvious how to use it and be clear what the system did, is doing now and will do in the future. But we’re not there yet, we have more ideas but we’d love to hear yours too.

Config & Policy Require Explicit Reload

Users may expect that edits to the Cascade configuration file or to policy files will take effect if Cascade is restarted, however this is not the case.

Cascade deliberately does not reload the configuration or policy files until explicitly told to do so via cascade config reload and cascade policy reload respectively.

This design ensures that a restart doesn’t suddenly cause unexpected changes in behaviour, e.g. config file edits that were made but never actually used and then forgotten about.

Differences to OpenDNSSEC

Improvements

  • An HSM is not required.

  • More suited to containerized usage: - Supports stdout/stderr logging as well as syslog. - Single daemon per image.

  • Rust.

  • Observability (Still a Work-In-Progress).

  • No XML.

  • No database.

  • No file based communication between daemons.

  • Finer grained control over and insight into key states.

Missing features

The alpha release of Cascade is missing some of the features provided by OpenDNSSEC that will be added in a future release:

  • No jitter support.

  • No IXFR out.

  • No file output.

  • No delay before automatic key deletion.

  • No holding keys for use until a backup flag is set.

  • No sharing of keys between zones.

  • No passthrough mode.

  • No incremental signing.

  • No support for sharing keys between zones.

  • No TSIG support.

  • No inbound XFR/NOTIFY access control.

  • No prefix based access control.

  • Terminology differences, Cascade does not use the term “omnipresent” for example.

NOT a complete authoritative name server

Cascade is NOT a complete authoritative DNS server. It will not reply with the AA or AD flag set. Nor can it reply to DNSSEC queries. Instead, Cascade is intended to be used as a hidden signer with a proper secondary such as NSD serving the signed zones to actual clients.

Other known limitations

  • No NOTIFY retry support.

  • No NOTIFY “Notify Set” (RFC 1996) discovery.

  • No KMIP batching support.

  • No DNS UPDATE support.

  • HSM algorithm support is limited to RSASHA256 and ECDSAP256SHA256.

  • Changing a policy to use a HSM will not affect existing zones.

  • Memory usage can be improved.