Re: [core] [dns-privacy] WGA call for draft-lenders-dns-over-coap

[Jaime Jiménez <[e-mail]>]

Dear all,


this is just a gentle reminder that the WGA call is scheduled to be 
closed by this Thursday 1st of September.

It would be great if the participants of the discussion could summarize 
their position towards the call. In particular for those ambivalent or 
opposing WGA.


Thanks!

CoRE Chairs.


On 24.8.2022 12.32, Matthias Waehlisch wrote:
> Hi Ted,
>
>    sorry for the late reply!
>
>    re scenarios: during bootstrappign, a constrained requires CoAP and
> DNS client capablities. for example, when an LwM2M client registers at a
> LwM2M server, which acts as a partial CoAP Resource Directory.
>
>    re: your statement "The privacy benefit of DoH wouldn't apply on a
> Thread network—you're hiding things that are easily discovered, and
> snooping is expensive, so constrained devices aren't likely to do it."
> i don't see why an attacker necessarily needs to use a constrained
> device.
>
>    can you elaborate on who is "we" in your arugmentation?
>
>
> thanks
>    matthias
>
> On Thu, 18 Aug 2022, Ted Lemon wrote:
>
>> Before you go down the mDNS-over-constrained-networks rabbit hole, you might want
>> to look at existing practice. E.g. Thread uses SRP (draft-ietf-dnssd-srp, in last
>> call) for service registration, and then uses regular DNS and DNS Push for lookups.
>> mDNS is used on the infrastructure link (e.g. WiFi) because it's ubiquitous and
>> permissionless, although it would be nice to get to where we could use DNS Push
>> there as well. The primary argument against mDNS for constrained networks and
>> devices is that it winds up delivering a lot of badput: nearly every mDNS packet is
>> useless for nearly every recipient. This isn't a problem for unconstrained networks
>> and unconstrained devices, but you don't want a battery operated device to have to
>> turn on its receiver and look at every service discovery packet, and possibly have
>> to forward it, when nearly all of them are not going to be of interest.
>> I think your main value-add here is compactness. Your argument for OSCORE sounds
>> convincing, but I'd like to see some practical application of this. If you are
>> thinking about how to do compression, why wait to write that draft? To me it seems
>> like a pretty clear sine qua non for the draft you're trying to work on first. To
>> put this in perspective, in the Thread work we've definitely considered ways to
>> compress DNS packets. We haven't done it, because it's not strictly necessary, but
>> this would certainly be an attractive thing to consider. Whereas the other stuff
>> you are doing here would not be at all compelling. We wouldn't be interested in
>> this caching mechanism, for example. Message privacy isn't very interesting, since
>> our primary use for DNS is DNS service discovery, and our secondary use is
>> basically also service discovery—finding the IP address of a cloud service with a
>> known name. The compelling use case for DoH is the ability to make HTTPS and DNS
>> lookups share fate; there's no similar compelling use case here. The privacy
>> benefit of DoH wouldn't apply on a Thread network—you're hiding things that are
>> easily discovered, and snooping is expensive, so constrained devices aren't likely
>> to do it.
>>
>> There may be a privacy story here, but I think if there is it needs to be
>> articulated, and not just assumed.
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 3:40 AM Martine Sophie Lenders <[e-mail]>
>> wrote:
>>        Hi!
>>
>>        Martine Lenders, here, one of the co-authors of the draft.
>>
>>        Indeed, as Carsten already stated: Using OSCORE is one of our main use
>>        cases, using a compressed format for DNS messages is another.
>>
>>        We implemented both DNS over DTLS and DNS over CoAP (DoC), including
>>        the variants DNS over CoAPS and DNS over OSCORE, for our evaluation of
>>        DoC [1]. It shows DNS over OSCORE to be in advantage compared to both
>>        DNS over DTLS or DNS over CoAPS. Yes, compared to DNS over DTLS it adds
>>        complexity, at least upfront, but it can be assumed that CoAP/OSCORE is
>>        already present for the application. This amortizes this disadvantage
>>        to only the construction and parsing of DNS messages. With DNS over
>>        DTLS (assuming we even use transport encryption with CoAP) we still
>>        need to implement the state machine of DNS over DTLS, in addition to
>>        DNS message handling. On the other hand side, we gain additional
>>        advantages from the CoAP feature set when using DoC, such as block-wise
>>        transfer and, as previously discussed, en route caching. The latter
>>        would also become possible in an end-to-end encrypted way with [2].
>>        Some of these advantages are mentioned in Section 1 of the draft.
>>
>>        For a compressed message format, we plan to provide a separate draft in
>>        the future, in an attempt to keep things simple and to easily make that
>>        content type also usable, e.g., with DoH.
>>
>>        Another use case is the usage of encrypted DNS over Low-Power WANs,
>>        e.g., LoRaWAN. Here, due to the transport encryption with DTLS,
>>        compression to fit the small PDUs and handle the low data rates [3], is
>>        not straightforward. As OSCORE encrypts on the application layer,
>>        however, we are able to compress most of the surrounding metadata away
>>        [4], and purely transport the encrypted payload.
>>
>>        Lastly, another possible use cases, which we did not evaluate in any
>>        way yet, would be an encrypted version of mDNS and thus DNS-SD,
>>        utilizing OSCORE group communication [5]. Multicast encryption is not
>>        covered by either of the other encrypted DNS-over-X solutions so far.
>>
>>        Best regards
>>        Martine
>>
>>        [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.07486.pdf
>>        [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-amsuess-core-cachable-oscore
>>        [3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8724
>>        [4] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8824
>>        [5] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-core-oscore-groupcomm
>>
>>        Am 15.08.22 um 20:09 schrieb Carsten Bormann:
>>
>> On 15. Aug 2022, at 19:41, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 15, 2022, at 1:34 PM, Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> On 15. Aug 2022, at 17:11, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> This is a good question. I think we’d want to understand what the actual use case i
>> s for DNS-over-CoAP before proceeding with this,
>>
>> The main use case is systems that already implement CoAP and do not want to add mac
>> hinery for some protocols that are used only for very specific purposes.
>>
>> You’re going to have to construct a DNS packet. I presume CoAP is using DTLS,
>>
>> DTLS is one choice, defined in RFC 7252.  Newer constrained implementation often lo
>> ok at OSCORE instead, RFC 8613.
>>
>> so you have to have DTLS. So again, I don’t see how this reduces complexity. It see
>> ms like it adds complexity.
>>
>> I haven’t checked this, but I would expect there are enough differences in how DNSo
>> DTLS uses DTLS that the complexity of getting this right exceeds that of using CoAP
>> .
>>
>> I’ll leave that to the authors; obviously, all caches have limitations, but being a
>> ble to make use of CoAP caches along the way would be an improvement.
>>
>> It is not a given that caching with CoAP makes things better. What is CoAP’s cachin
>> g behavior? How will it handle short TTLs? Reading the document, it’s clear this ha
>> s not been considered.
>>
>> The -00 version does not have to solve those problems.  Slideware does exist for th
>> em...
>>
>> Given that the whole point of this is to make DNS connections private, I would assu
>> me that the cache shouldn’t have the credentials to peek into the packet. Except th
>> at it must. So I really don’t understand the threat model here.
>>
>> OSCORE was designed to offer some capabilities in this regard.  I’m sure a future d
>> ocument will include examples for that.
>> But this is work that best can be done in the working group, between implementers a
>> nd experts for the specific protocols and their caching behaviors.
>>
>> That can definitely be done (for a definition of “compress” — a concise form for so
>> me DNS data might be a better approach), but it to me it seemed working out the pro
>> tocol machinery first is the right way to proceed here.  (From the point of view of
>>   the CoAP protocol, this would just be a separate media type.)
>>
>> I don’t think this is true. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you shou
>> ld. Until we can come up with some use case for this that solves a problem that isn
>> ’t already solved, I don’t think the IETF should be pursuing this work at all.
>>
>> It seems to me you are basing this view on a scan of the individual submission docu
>> ment.
>> WG discussions have happened (and many WG members are also cognizant of, e.g., CoAP
>>   caching behavior), so it is not a surprise that many of use come to a different co
>> nclusion.
>>
>> Grüße, Carsten
>>
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-- 
Jaime Jiménez