On 2010-03-07, at 03:06, George Barwood wrote:

> I have been wondering about this.

Our[*] reasoning so far with respect to signing ROOT-SERVERS.NET can I think be 
paraphrased as follows:

- if we sign ROOT-SERVERS.NET it will trigger large responses (the RRSIGs over 
the A and AAAA RRSets) which is a potential disadvantage
- if we do not sign ROOT-SERVERS.NET there is a threat that the unsigned A and 
AAAA RRSets from ROOT-SERVERS.NET might be spoofed somehow and that the 
spoofing will be undetected
- however, since the root zone is signed, validators can already tell when they 
are talking to a root server that serves bogus information
- signing ROOT-SERVERS.NET would result in potentially-harmful large responses 
with no increase in security
- let's not do that then

I also find Jim's point regarding NET rather compelling. If the NET zone is not 
signed, then validating responses from a signed ROOT-SERVERS.NET zone would 
require yet another trust anchor to be manually-configured.

It's hard for me to agree that the aggregate operational complexity involved in 
those manual trust anchors, and the potential effects of a KSK-roll without 
synchronised updating of that static configuration, represents a smaller risk 
than leaving the zone unsigned, at least for now.

If this logic is faulty then I'd love to hear about it.


Joe

[*] I say "our", but really I mean my personal recollection of conversations 
with other members of the root-signing design team some time ago, which I 
haven't cross-checked with anybody before hitting send.
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