Re: [DNSOP] Benoit Claise's No Objection on draft-ietf-dnsop-root-loopback-04: (with COMMENT)

["Paul Hoffman" <[e-mail]>]

On 28 Sep 2015, at 6:53, Benoit Claise wrote:

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> COMMENT:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  Malicious third
>  parties might be able to observe that traffic on the network between
>  the recursive resolver and one or more of the DNS roots
>  ....
>  The primary goals of this design is to provide faster negative
>  responses to stub resolver queries that contain junk queries, and to
>  prevent queries and responses from being visible on the network.
>
> I've been wondering. So this mechanism is basically to speed up junk
> queries.
> What can a malicious third party do by observing junk queries. 
> Nothing, I
> guess.

Actually, seeing junk queries can leak some valuable information. For 
example, imagine that some malware sends junk queries for a known name; 
seeing that can be valuable information for someone watching the stream 
of requests. There are some companies whose business model include 
watching cache misses in recursive resolvers for interesting patterns.

> I guess you want something like.
> OLD:
>  The primary goals of this design is to provide faster negative
>  responses to stub resolver queries that contain junk queries, and to
>  prevent queries and responses from being visible on the network.
>
> NEW:
>  The primary goals of this design is to provide faster negative
>  responses to stub resolver queries that contain junk queries, and to
>  prevent valid queries and responses from being visible on the 
> network.

Given the above, we would like to leave the text as-is because some 
recursive operators care about exposure of bad queries as well.

--Paul Hoffman and Warren Kumari