Hi David,

Thanks, again with no hats, except for my comment on the first question.  
Please see inline …

From: David Conrad <[email protected]>
Sent: 23 October 2022 20:01
To: Rob Wilton (rwilton) <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [DNSOP] [Ext] Possible alt-tld last call?

Rob,

On Oct 22, 2022, at 10:33 AM, Rob Wilton (rwilton) 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

As I read it, the partitioning of the domain name namespace is really to 
achieve two aims:

On this mailing list, I think there is a pretty good understanding of the 
intent of .alt and I don’t think there is much in the way of disagreement on 
that intent. As far as I can tell, the points of contention are:


  1.  whether the IETF “reserving” a TLD is intruding on ICANN’s territory.

RW:
With a “responsible AD for this document hat on”, I would like to ask the WG to 
consider this question as being out of scope for the moment, and assume that 
this work is within the scope of the IETF.  After WG LC, I propose that the WG 
chairs, ADs, IAB, and ICANN liaison discuss this.  My current expectation is 
that we probably will send ICANN a liaison to politely let them know what we 
are doing, so that they have the opportunity to comment, and we would consider 
any feedback that they give, returning the document back to the WG, if needed.


  1.  whether there will be a registry of .alt uses (i.e., non-DNS name 
resolution systems) and if so, who will operate that registry.

RW:
The document should only define a registry of .alt uses if the registry is 
managed by IANA.


3) whether the inevitable leakage of .alt queries to the DNS represent 
potential issues, and if so, should there be an effort to address those issues.

RW:
I’ll defer answering that one to the experts, on which I am not one.


FWIW, my views:

1) Ask the stupid question.
2) A voluntary, lightweight registry operated by IANA can help developers avoid 
collision.
3) Identifying leakage to the DNS as a protocol violation can, over time, help 
reduce that leakage.

This is outside my area of expertise, but I'm not convinced that the global DNS 
would see any significant increase in load, because the stub resolver would 
generally not be sending the requests to the DNS assuming that they are valid 
domains, and if they are not valid domains then that would seem to be the same 
as what DNS already handles today.

The root of the DNS is a commons, supported by volunteers who are paying out of 
their own pocket to provision a global infrastructure. I’m personally not 
comfortable recommending techniques that can add undefined (could be minimal, 
might not be: no one knows for sure) load to that infrastructure.

If you look at the ICANN OCTO web page Paul referenced earlier 
(https://magnitude.research.icann.org) and filter for “special use” TLDs, 
you’ll see data related to the number of queries received.  Some of those 
(e.g., .local) are non-trivial and, in my opinion, are indications of 
brokenness that should be fixed — the root shouldn’t be seeing those queries. 
My suggestion of using RFC 2119 “MUST NOT” language (i.e., queries for names in 
.alt MUST NOT be sent to the root server system supported by IANA) is in an 
effort to discourage an increase in that query volume over time.

RW:
If this is a general problem for “special use” TLDs then it would be better to 
have a separate document that handles those consistently and generically rather 
than creating a new rule specifically for .alt domains.


It seems obvious to me that if a namespace is explicitly defined to not be in 
the DNS, embedding a reliance on the DNS would be a protocol violation.  I am 
actually surprised that this would be controversial.

And as for the eavesdropping concern, doesn't this equally apply for all domain 
lookups, particularly invalid ones?

As I’m sure you’re aware, by default, DNS is plain text. If a non-DNS name 
resolution protocol is specified to not be plain text (presumably any new 
protocol would be encrypted), then users of that protocol have an expectation 
that their queries are protected.  By falling back to DNS, that expectation is 
silently violated.

RW:
This is a reasonable point to consider, even though it also feels like the 
world may end up moving to DoH, or DoQ fairly quickly. Personally, I think that 
it is somewhat hard for users to have that general expectation if the name 
resolution is using a combination of name resolution protocols (including 
unencrypted DNS).

Regards,
Rob


Regards,
-drc

_______________________________________________
DNSOP mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop

Reply via email to