Re: [Add] What to do in this potential working group

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

Jari,

I understand that this is your opinion and the argument you re making but I
can't say I agree with the overall assessment you are making.

We have a situation now where the DNS is tragically insecure and nonprivate
-- and not really that decentralized -- and we have an opportunity ti make
it more secure at the cost of making it more centralized. In this instance,
I think that's a tradeoff worth considering, while also looking for ways to
minimize centralization.

-Ekr


On Wed, Aug 21, 2019 at 11:55 AM Jari Arkko <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Ekr,
>
> I fully realise that there will be differences of viewpoints when it comes
> to the trustworthiness of individual DNS service providers.
>
> But I was trying to make a different point. While we may disagree which
> provider I’d like to use for the DNS service, I think it would be quite
> reasonable for us to agree that if all of us put our all our queries in one
> place (whatever that is) that this causes severe problems:
>
> - That place becomes immensely valuable from a commercial data mining
> perspective. There’s a risk that it will at least at some point be used for
> data mining, despite whatever the intentions of the people who set this
> system up now is.
>
> - That place becomes immensely interesting to for governments to tap.
> There’s a risk that this tapping is either already happening or will be
> happening going forward, despite best intentions of the people who set it
> up or who manage it.
>
> - That places becomes critical infrastructure and a weak point that we do
> not need in the Internet.
>
> As a result, I would like to suggest that the IETF actually concludes the
> above and recommends against this practice.
>
> For whatever it is worth, I can understand some motivations for doing
> something like this e.g. in browsers. Some good reasons and potentially
> also some not so good reasons. But even with that background, it is
> difficult for me to imagine a worse act for the Internet than making
> browsers call home for every action of the user. The privacy impacts for
> the users are unimaginably bad.
>
> A few years ago we realised that surveillance organisations were looking
> at people's traffic, and we managed to change the Internet to protect this
> traffic with cryptographic means. I think it is to think about the next
> step, and ensure that we don’t create an Internet architecture that puts
> everyone’s data at central location.
>
> Obviously, encrypted DNS is still hugely important, as are global DNS
> services. However, the deployment model of using one (or a small number of)
> providers is just wrong. That would be fixable.
>
> Jari
>
>