[DNSOP] NXDOMAIN and RFC 8020

["Murray S. Kucherawy" <[e-mail]>]

I'm wondering something about tree walks, which John Levine asked about in
November, as it's a topic of interest to the evolution of DMARC.

I've read RFC 8020 which says an NXDOMAIN cached for "foo.example" also
covers later queries for "bar.foo.example".  Makes sense.

Can this be used (or maybe amended) to cover the queries if they come in
the reverse order?  For instance, if "bar.foo.example" arrives first, but
the authoritative server can determine that the entire "foo.example" tree
doesn't exist, could it reply with an NXDOMAIN for the question plus a
cacheable indication about the entire tree instead of just the name that
was in the question?

This would make an ascending tree walk even for something crazy like
"a.b.c.d.....y.z.foo.example" extremely cheap as the cached NXDOMAIN for
"foo.example" covers the entire subtree, for a caching nameserver
implementing RFC 8020.

Maybe this is discussed somewhere that I missed in the references.  I'm
happy to take a "go read this for the answer" if that's the case.

Thanks,

-MSK