Re: [DNSOP] Questions on draft-ietf-dnsop-delegation-only

[Joe Abley <[e-mail]>]

Hi Paul,

On 30 Jul 2020, at 15:43, Paul Wouters <[e-mail]> wrote:

> You are mixing up the generic policy of delegation only with the exact
> semantics of the bit.

I don't think so, but I would definitely appreciate some clarification if you think that's happening.

> The .org is definately what I would call a
> delegation-only domain. Now let's examine the corner case you have
> and see if/what we can do.

OK. Note that it's not a corner case, however; there are many thousands of examples of this and although I haven't examined every single serial that has ever been published, it seems entirely plausible that that there has never been an ORG zone published since 2002 which has been delegation-only.

> Rephrasing what you are saying is that "sometimes we need to take over
> our children and we currently do this in such a away that we would no
> longer appear to be delegation only".

That's a fairly clumsy way of saying what I mean, but it's entirely possible we are talking about the same thing :-)

> So you are saying that if ns1.example.org serves another-example.org
> and example.org is suspended for abuse, that you will still service
> A records for ns1.example.org and NS records for another-example.org
> containing ns1.example.org but no NS records for example.org? In
> the hopes that another-example.org keeps working?

That also seems quite imprecise. Here's a more specific worked example to make sure we understand each other.

$ORIGIN ORG.

BADDOMAIN NS ...
BADDOMAIN NS ...
NS1.BADDOMAIN A 192.0.2.1

GOODDOMAIN NS NS1.BADDOMAIN.ORG.
GOODDOMAIN NS ...

If BADDOMAIN.ORG is suspended (or if the domain is suppressed for some equivalent reason) then the zone cut betwen ORG and BADDOMAIN.ORG will be removed (the BADDOMAIN.ORG NS set will disappear) but the A record above will remain, since it is linked to another domain, GOODDOMAIN.ORG, that depends upon it. Without a zone cut, that makes the ORG servers authoritative for the A record.

To a certain extent, this behaviour is a consequence of (a) the venerable operaetional need to suspend domains because they have been implicated in abuse and (b) the EPP data model used in the ORG registry, which itself has its origins in the RRP data model used before the re-delegation of ORG to PIR in 2002. As such, it's tempting to assert that the behaviour is a contractual requirement shared with all other gTLDs that are operated subject to the same contract that exists between PIR and ICANN, hence my question about applicability.

> Wouldn't that already fail with DNS servers like unbound with:
> 
> 	harden-glue: yes
> 	harden-dnssec-stripped: yes
> 	harden-below-nxdomain: yes
> 	harden-referral-path: yes
> 
> which is the default in Fedora / RHEL / CentOS and maybe others?

If so, that sounds like a problem with Fedora/RHEL/CentOS. To the best of my knowledge, this has been the way that ORG has operated for the past 18+ years.


Joe