systemd-resolved cannot do dns over tls with server using self signed certificates

[Sergio Callegari]

While testing functionalities of knot resolver, I am experiencing issues in how systemd-resolved interacts with it. I have the caching and forwarding knot resolver running on a debian machine and systemd-resolved running on an ubuntu focal machine.

It looks like systemd-resolved cannot communicate with kresd, when told to do so using dns over tls. I think that this is because kresd by default uses a self signed certificate for TLS and systemd-resolved does not like it. In fact, if I set dnsovertls on resolved and enable debug logging, I see in the journal entries like:

Failed to invoke gnutls_handshake: Error in the certificate verification.

and the name resolution fails:

resolvectl query lwn.net
lwn.net: resolve call failed: All attempts to contact name servers or networks failed

On the other hand if I set dnsovertls to opportunistic, things seem to work, but the log reports that systemd-resolved is "Using degraded feature set UDP for DNS server".

It is my understanding that systemd-resolved should accept self-signed certificates and should do certificate validation only if a special syntax is used for for specifying the DNS server to also include a hostname for the DNS server (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-resolved#DNS_over_TLS). In fact, the documentation of systemd-resolved seems to be a bit thin on the matter, particularly because I understand that behaviors are changing across different systemd-resolved versions.

In any case, being able to make systemd-resolved work with DoT with servers using self signed certificages would be very useful for testing and learning.

Unfortunately, trying a more recent version of systemd-resolved is not really easy without firing up a virtual machine because it is impossible to update systemd-resolved independently of all the init system, with some obvious risk of breaking a system.

[Nick Rosbrook (enr0n)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. I suspect a support site would be more appropriate, e.g. https://askubuntu.com, or for more options please look at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/community-support/709.