On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 2:38 PM John Levine <[email protected]> wrote: > > It appears that Ben Schwartz <[email protected]> said: > >I think the "Privacy Considerations" section should probably mention QNAME > >minimization, which ought to help a little. > > I'd also like it to say more clearly up front that .ALT is for names that are > totally outside the DNS protocols, not for names handled locally using DNS > protocols. > It's for things like .onion, not like .local.
Yup, what John said. The important part is: "This document reserves a string (ALT) to be used as a TLD label **in non-DNS contexts.**" (emphasis added). There are a bunch of different name resolution mechanisms - DNS is the most common, but there are also an increasing number of things like .onion, various blockchain-based systems (some of which have some cool privacy features), etc. For obvious reasons "alternate"[0] resolution systems use the same format/style of names as the DNS (LDH, case insensitivity, etc) - people want to be able to enter the identifiers into "normal" applications and have them just work (e.g things like "foo:bar:baz" don't work - ssh[1] for example won't pass this to a resolution call). There are similar issues with defining new schemas, etc; there is a reason that it's e.g http://www.facebookcorewwwi.onion/ and not http://www.facebookcorewwwi.¯\_(ツ)_/¯/ or hQQp://www.facebookcorewwwi.onion/. Unfortunately, having multiple resolution systems using the same namespace and syntax does not provide a signal to denote which resolution mechanism should be used - clearly .com is "in the DNS" and .onion isn't -- but this doesn't scale, and simply saying "the DNS is the only resolution system" doesn't either.... I'm guessing that everyone knows all this, but we had lots of *long* discussions around the various options in ~2014 - 2017, and I figured that much of the state might have been paged out... Some other background: https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/explicit-internet-naming-systems-ename/ https://www.ietf.org/blog/ename-workshop/ > > > >I would also be interested in seeing some guidance about interaction > >between the relative form (.alt) and good old-fashioned search domains. It > >seems to me that the interaction there is poor... perhaps bad enough to > >recommend using the absolute form only. > > I thought we all agreed that search lists are bad when .CS was added to the > root. Yup. There should indeed be some more text around search-lists and search-list processing; much of the purpose of this is to be able to differentiate the namespaces, and search-lists are a place where they may bump into each other again. John's right again -- we *did* all agree that search lists are bad when .CS was added... and also in RFC 1123 (specifically, section 6.1.4.3 (2)), RFC 1535, and RFC 1536. Andrew McConachie and I even started writing "DNS Search Lists Considered Dangerous", before deciding that this was probably tilting at windmills... W [0]: This isn't intended to be pejorative, I'm just trying to separate these from what we normally assume in this community when we talk about a name resolution system [1]: OpenSSH_8.6p1, OpenSSL 1.1.1k 25 Mar 2021 > > > R's, > John > > _______________________________________________ > DNSOP mailing list > [email protected] > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop -- The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making. -- E. W. Dijkstra _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
