All,

Renesys has since a few days had a blog post at 
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2010/06/two-strikes-i-root.shtml. On the 9th I 
urged them to provide us with any data if they are seeing incorrect responses 
from NAY i.root-servers.net instance, and share that with n...@netnod.se. I 
have so far received a single email from Renesys on friday morning CET time. 
That email did not contain any data or further information. I asked to share 
that email with the Nanog list as Renesys will apparently share some results on 
studies of the i.root-servers.net in Beijing. I have no insight into what these 
findings, and Renesys did not respond to my request to see them before hand. 

As of today Renesys have updated their blog post with data that seems to 
indicate that they have seen incorrect responses from an i.root-servers.net 
instance. This is the first report of such responses since we re-activated our 
anycast node in Beijing, and we only saw this by monitoring the comments field 
to he blog post. At the time of re-activating the node we did test from all 
locations we could find and queried the i.root-servers.net node in Beijing, and 
we did not see any incorrect responses. 

Now, I would request that you all *please* report operational issues with 
i.root-servers.netm or in case you see any behavior you do not expect to 
n...@netnod.se. 

Unfortunately noone from us will attend the upcoming Nanog meeting, and I can't 
from the agenda see when the presentation is due. I am happy to answer any 
questions directly though, and I will try and read Renesys results as soon as 
they are published. In the mean time, as we are dealing what is potentially an 
operational problem, please report any issues to us. 

To provide some background, I will share some of my responses to the Renesys 
email on friday - although I admit they are taken out of context I think they 
do provide some general background information that might be worth sharing. 

---
As I wrote in my response to your blogpost, the node in China has ALWAYS been 
globally reachable (what ever that means. In our terminology it means we are 
not exporting the prefixes with no-export, so the prefixes propagates as far as 
our peers advertise them). 
---
As to the above, many countries tamper with DNS responses so I have no way of 
assuring anyone that a packet that traverses many countries, many regulations 
and many networks owners are ever tampered with. In the case where queries to 
our node in Beijing was seen to respond with incorrect responses, we have 
obviously been in discussions with our hosts for the node in Beijing and they 
have as we understand it been in discussions with many of the networks in 
China. What we understand from these discussions, the occurrence of these 
incorrect responses for queries sent to i.root-servers.net was a mistake. I 
have no insight into why or how the mistake happened, but we have been assured 
it won't be possible for it to happen again. That said - let me again stress 
that neither we nor anyone else, can assure that packets on the Internet does 
not get tampered with along the path. What we can do is to deploy mechanisms 
that will detect this tampering at the application layer, for example DNSSEC. 
---

Kurt Erik Lindqvist
CEO Netnod



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