Hi.

This document define essentially two mechanisms: port-based DNS-over-TLS
AND upgrade-based DNS-over-TLS.  I may have missed earlier discussions
about this design choice.  However I want to understand why you
want/need this complexity, to make sure there really was a good
motivation behind that choice.

For SMTP, IMAP, POP etc the reason for having both port-based and
upgrade-based is legacy and historic reasons: back in the days the
STARTTLS approach wasn't invented, so following HTTP(S) footsteps, new
ports were allocated for "secure" protocol variants.  Modern protocols
does not have this issue; compare XMPP.

Having two parallel mechanisms for a latency-sensitive protocol leads to
the necessity of doing a "happy eyeballs" approach in implementation to
decrease latency.  There is quite some complexity in getting that right.
Compare RFC 6555 for that approach on a IPv4+IPv6 level.  DNS is
relatively latency sensitive, unlike IMAP/SMTP/XMPP.

What I'm basically wondering, and advocating, is if perhaps one method
would be sufficient.  This would reduce complexity on the protocol and
implementation level.

The preference in IETF has been for the inband STARTTLS approach, so I
suppose that would be the choice of least resistance.  The only reason
against that in your document is a vague "maybe interact poorly with
middle boxes that inspect DNS traffic" -- and I would like to challenge
that this is sufficient motivation to introduce the complexity of having
both port-based and upgrade-based DNS-over-TLS.  Certainly middle boxes
that inspect traffic may interact poorly with port-based DNS-over-TLS as
well.

I would go further and say that middle boxes that interfer with DNS
traffic should be considered part of the problem, not part of the
solution.

Thanks,
/Simon

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