One of the concerns raised at IETF 112 about
draft-dkgjsal-dprive-unilateral probing was that unilateral probing by
recrusive resolvers might "poison the well" and discourage authoritative
servers from deploying encrypted transport.

For example, in jabber, Erik Nygren commented: "TOFU has a big "poison
the well" risk here that will prevent operators from enabling."

  https://jabber.ietf.org/jabber/logs/dprive/2021-11-11.html#13:07:33.595176
    ("TOFU" means "Trust on First Use")

I think this is a legitimate concern: one of the goals of the draft is
to describe how to probe in a way that *doesn't* discourage adoption.

Would folks who have this concern (maybe including Erik, if you're
reading!) take a look at the draft and identify any specific behavior
that you think could be problematic?

I don't think the behavior that Joey and I have specified in
unilateral-probing does TOFU, since it's entirely unconcerned with
authentication.  So there is no "trust on first use" with regards to
choice of server authentication credentials from this perspective.

If an initial attempt at encrypted transport fails, there will be no
penalty, because the cleartext query is ("happy eyeballs"-style) already
in flight.

If an authoritative server never offers an encrypted transport, each
recursive resolver client will check its status at most once a day (see
the `damping` parameter), and will accept a "port closed" message as a
failure, so it's not going to increase costs for cleartext-only
authoritatives in any significant way.  This should also reduce concerns
about runaway retries consuming excessive resources.

And, if an authoritative that has previously offered encrypted transport
stops offering it, there will be at most a one-time very short delay (a
few seconds, see the `timeout` parameter) for each recursive resolver
that had expected encrypted transport, before it falls back to
cleartext.

So i think the probing described here shouldn't scare anyone off from
deploying at the authoritative.  Is this analysis missing something?

    --dkg

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