COREDNS-SIGN(7) CoreDNS Plugins COREDNS-SIGN(7) NAME sign - adds DNSSEC records to zone files. DESCRIPTION The sign plugin is used to sign (see RFC 6781) zones. In this process DNSSEC resource records are added. The signatures that sign the resource records sets have an expiration date, this means the signing process must be repeated before this expiration data is reached. Otherwise the zone's data will go BAD (RFC 4035, Section 5.5). The sign plugin takes care of this. Only NSEC is supported, sign does not support NSEC3. Sign works in conjunction with the file and auto plugins; this plugin signs the zones files, auto and file serve the zones data. For this plugin to work at least one Common Signing Key, (see coredns-key- gen(1)) is needed. This key (or keys) will be used to sign the entire zone. Sign does not support the ZSK/KSK split, nor will it do key or algorithm rollovers - it just signs. Sign will: * (Re)-sign the zone with the CSK(s) when: - the last time it was signed is more than a 6 days ago. Each zone will have some jitter applied to the inception date. - the signature only has 14 days left before expiring. Both these dates are only checked on the SOA's signature(s). * Create RRSIGs that have an inception of -3 hours (minus a jitter be- tween 0 and 18 hours) and a expiration of +32 (plus a jitter between 0 and 5 days) days for every given DNSKEY. * Add NSEC records for all names in the zone. The TTL for these is the negative cache TTL from the SOA record. * Add or replace all apex CDS/CDNSKEY records with the ones derived from the given keys. For each key two CDS are created one with SHA1 and an- other with SHA256. * Update the SOA's serial number to the Unix epoch of when the signing happens. This will overwrite any previous serial number. There are two ways that dictate when a zone is signed. Normally every 6 days (plus jitter) it will be resigned. If for some reason we fail this check, the 14 days before expiring kicks in. Keys are named (following BIND9): K<name>+<alg>+<id>.key and K<name>+<alg>+<id>.private. The keys must not be included in your zone; they will be added by sign. These keys can be generated with coredns-keygen or BIND9's dnssec-keygen. You don't have to adhere to this naming scheme, but then you need to name your keys explicitly, see the keys file direc- tive. A generated zone is written out in a file named db.<name>.signed in the di- rectory named by the directory directive (which defaults to /var/lib/coredns). SYNTAX sign DBFILE [ZONES...] { key file|directory KEY...|DIR... directory DIR } * DBFILE the zone database file to read and parse. If the path is rela- tive, the path from the root plugin will be prepended to it. * ZONES zones it should be sign for. If empty, the zones from the config- uration block are used. * key specifies the key(s) (there can be multiple) to sign the zone. If file is used the KEY's filenames are used as is. If directory is used, sign will look in DIR for K<name>+<alg>+<id> files. Any metadata in these files (Activate, Publish, etc.) is ignored. These keys must also be Key Signing Keys (KSK). * directory specifies the DIR where CoreDNS should save zones that have been signed. If not given this defaults to /var/lib/coredns. The zones are saved under the name db.<name>.signed. If the path is relative the path from the root plugin will be prepended to it. Keys can be generated with coredns-keygen, to create one for use in the sign plugin, use: coredns-keygen example.org or dnssec-keygen -a ECD- SAP256SHA256 -f KSK example.org. EXAMPLES Sign the example.org zone contained in the file db.example.org and write the result to ./db.example.org.signed to let the file plugin pick it up and serve it. The keys used are read from /etc/coredns/keys/Kexample.org.key and /etc/coredns/keys/Kexample.org.private. example.org { file db.example.org.signed sign db.example.org { key file /etc/coredns/keys/Kexample.org directory . } } Running this leads to the following log output (note the timers in this ex- ample have been set to shorter intervals). [WARNING] plugin/file: Failed to open "open /tmp/db.example.org.signed: no such file or directory": trying again in 1m0s [INFO] plugin/sign: Signing "example.org." because open /tmp/db.example.org.signed: no such file or directory [INFO] plugin/sign: Successfully signed zone "example.org." in "/tmp/db.example.org.signed" with key tags "59725" and 1564766865 SOA serial, elapsed 9.357933ms, next: 2019-08-02T22:27:45.270Z [INFO] plugin/file: Successfully reloaded zone "example.org." in "/tmp/db.example.org.signed" with serial 1564766865 Or use a single zone file for multiple zones, note that the ZONES are re- peated for both plugins. Also note this outputs multiple signed output files. Here we use the default output directory /var/lib/coredns. . { file /var/lib/coredns/db.example.org.signed example.org file /var/lib/coredns/db.example.net.signed example.net sign db.example.org example.org example.net { key directory /etc/coredns/keys } } This is the same configuration, but the zones are put in the server block, but note that you still need to specify what file is served for what zone in the file plugin: example.org example.net { file var/lib/coredns/db.example.org.signed example.org file var/lib/coredns/db.example.net.signed example.net sign db.example.org { key directory /etc/coredns/keys } } Be careful to fully list the origins you want to sign, if you don't: example.org example.net { sign plugin/sign/testdata/db.example.org miek.org { key file /etc/coredns/keys/Kexample.org } } This will lead to db.example.org be signed twice, as this entire section is parsed twice because you have specified the origins example.org and exam- ple.net in the server block. Forcibly resigning a zone can be accomplished by removing the signed zone file (CoreDNS will keep on serving it from memory), and sending SIGUSR1 to the process to make it reload and resign the zone file. SEE ALSO The DNSSEC RFCs: RFC 4033, RFC 4034 and RFC 4035. And the BCP on DNSSEC, RFC 6781. Further more the manual pages coredns-keygen(1) and dnssec-key- gen(8). And the file plugin's documentation. Coredns-keygen can be found at https://github.com/coredns/coredns-utils <https://github.com/coredns/coredns-utils> in the coredns-keygen directory. Other useful DNSSEC tools can be found in ldns <https://nlnet- labs.nl/projects/ldns/about/>, e.g. ldns-key2ds to create DS records from DNSKEYs. BUGS keys directory is not implemented. CoreDNS March 2026 COREDNS-SIGN(7)
NAME | DESCRIPTION | SYNTAX | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | BUGS
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