Re: [DNSOP] What is the purpose of NSEC3 "closest encloser" proofs?

Or to put it another way

You can have a NSEC3 records that proves that a.b.c.example and *.b.c.example don’t exists but the wildcard you need to be checking is *.c.example when b.c.example does not exist or maybe even *.example if c.example does not exist.

Mark

> On 9 Oct 2020, at 14:13, Shumon Huque <shuque@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2020 at 10:38 PM Nick Johnson <nick@ethereum.org> wrote:
> 
> Let's use your example and say 'a.b.c.example' doesn't exist in the zone example.
> 
> Let's also say the longest ancestor of this name that actually does exist in the zone is 'c.example' (which could be an empty non-terminal or not -- either way, it will have an NSEC3 record matching the hash of the name).
> 
> The NXDOMAIN proof consists of:
> 
> ### Closest Encloser proof:
> * the NSEC3 RR that matches the closest encloser name 'c.example'
> * the NSEC3 RR that covers the next closer name 'b.c.example'
> 
> Right; what I don't follow is why the second of those two proofs isn't sufficient. Doesn't that alone prove that a.b.c.example doesn't exist?
> 
> It does. But the first NSEC3 is required for two reasons: the NSEC3 negative proof is defined in terms of finding the longest ancestor of the qname that does not exist, and also because we need to prove that the wildcard synthesis was not possible. Both those things require us to compute the closest encloser first.
> 
> Shumon.
> 
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Mark Andrews, ISC
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