Hi,

First, let me say that I like Mark's sketch of ENAME that I read on
this list.  (To disclose my bias, I had a much inferior, faintly
similar idea a couple years ago, but it was not complete, and not as
compact or elegant.  The customer I offered it to therefore told me
not to pursue it.)  I think the ENAME suggestion is a promising idea
(though it needs fleshing out and deeper evaluation).  I think it is a
vast improvement over the last suggestion in this direction (BNAME).
Nevertheless,

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 09:43:42AM +1000, Mark Andrews wrote:

> the zone support it.  It would just be insecure until validators
> catch up.  

…I think that may be a little too glib.  Given the DNSSEC environment
these days, I'm not sure we can just shrug our shoulders at the idea
of breaking DNSSEC validators.  Replacing validators on a large scale
takes perhaps 18-24 months (it's a new feature, and a lot of "stable"
server systems are now committed to no feature change in that time
scale), and likely longer for really complete penetration.  End point
validation uptake is worse; but on the other hand that continues to be
an enthusiast market, so it might be ok.  _But_, there might be a
slightly better argument.

The driving use cases for ENAME are for zones that today are almost
certainly not signing and, perhaps more importantly, have a whole
bunch of challenges in signing.  "Stupid DNS tricks" in the presence
of DNSSEC are awful hard.  Given the still-low utility in end point
validation, an administrator of such a candidate zone might not be
ready to adopt DNSSEC anyway.  So, if we quickly added ENAME and got
the algorithm change in place, then validators might be ready in time.

I can't say I'm optimistic about this.  ENAME would require special
server-side processing, so it's full standards action.  If we as a
community are actually convinced this is worth doing, however, then we
ought to be able to crank this out in 3-5 months.

I have heard people claim that we shut down DNSEXT too fast.  It took
years to do that, which I took to be evidence that we did it too
slowly.  Perhaps this is an opportunity for those who think I was too
keen to prove what a jerk I am.  That oughta be incentive ;-)  

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email protected]

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