Re: [dnsext] DNSSEC, robustness, and several DS records

[Doug Barton <[e-mail]>]

On 05/11/2011 15:50, Francis Dupont wrote:
>   In your previous mail you wrote:
>
>     What Paul is (I believe) indicating is that doing the latter isn't quite in
>     keeping with the general spirit of the RFC, or in the "be liberal in what
>     you accept" philosophy.
>
> =>  The RFC says:
>
>     Validator implementations SHOULD ignore DS RRs containing SHA-1
>     digests if DS RRs with SHA-256 digests are present in the DS RRset.
>
> so it doesn't say "valid" SHA-256 digests or something else.
> I am sorry but there is one possible interpretation of the text,
> of course we can agree the text is bad (:-). BTW I already signaled
> there is no guideline for other (than SHA-1 and SHA-256) digest
> algorithms so anyway a new document is needed...

A) Insert obligatory rant about why "should" and "may" should never be 
used in standards documents.
B) I don't think it takes even the smallest leap of imagination to say 
that if the SHA-256 DS is invalid, and the SHA-1 DS is valid, the SHA-1 
should be used and the SHA-256 should be ignored.

I think we could have a fine "angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin" debate about 
what "present" means in the RFC text, but I have a hard time believing 
that the intent of the text is that if you have something that works it 
should be ignored in favor of something that doesn't.

One could imagine a theoretical downgrade attack where the attacker 
somehow got access to the parent and was able to invalidate the SHA-256 
DS so that they could do their nefarious magic with the SHA-1 version, 
but if you could gain that kind of access to the parent wouldn't you 
have better ways to cause mischief?


Doug

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