Re: [homenet] securing zone transfer

[Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>]

Juliusz Chroboczek <[e-mail]> wrote:
    > Thank you for your detailed reply.  I'm glad we're finally having
    > a discussion about my objections to Daniel's proposal.

    >> We strongly believe that the HNA needs to know the list of names in
    >> order to be able to answer for those names when there is unstable (or
    >> no) Internet connectivity.

    >> Otherwise, applications and people have to know two different names for the
    >> service. (A public one for when away, and the .local one)

    > That's a good point.  While I happen to believe that it's reasonable to
    > have a service known as "boombox.local" from home, and
    > "boombox.jch.example.org" from the Internet, this might be inconvenient
    > for e.g. smartphone users.

Actually, it's fatal, because you can't get a certificate for "boombox.local"
so you can't secure it that way.  So you always have to use the FQDN.

    >> o  the credentials for the dynamic DNS server need to be securely
    >> transferred to the hosts that wish to use it.  This is not a
    >> problem for a technical user to do with one or two hosts, but it
    >> does not scale to multiple hosts and becomes a problem for non-
    >> technical users.

    > I think that's our main disagreement.

    > For some reason, you guys seem to be assuming that the average user will
    > want to publish hundreds of names in the global DNS.

Hundreds?  How about two.
My son wants to publish his desktop's name so that his friend can reach his
system directly for minecraft.  I want the same.  Yes, it's native IPv6 the
whole way, but they don't know that, and they don't have to know that.

    > However, none of the end-user services that I know use incoming
    > connections require a name in the global DNS to function (WebRTC, Skype,
    > online games, BitTorrent, remote desktops, BTSync/Resilio, syncthing).

All of these are applications which either presently use cloud relays due to
NAT, or exchange IP addresses within the protocol.  All of these applications
are built during the IPv4 mindset of scarcity.

    > Thus, my assumption is that the typical user will want to publish exactly
    > 0 public names, and that only the extreme geek will publish up to 3 or 4
    > (music server, NAS, game server, web server with family photographs).

    > Richard, Daniel -- please be so kind as to explain why you think my
    > assumption is wrong.  How many names do you envision wanting to publish in
    > the public DNS, and for what purpose?

I think that you are living in the late 1990s IPv4 scarcity world.
The gigabit connected IPv6 home doesn't have to be like that.

I know at least twenty minor geeks who have music servers, NAS,
game server boxes and that family web server.  Yet, have no clue what
an IP address is.

Many of them have griped to me that there should be a way for them to easily
give their stuff names that they can access.  We've spoken at times of
building more mesh networks here, but what's the point if you can't give
things good names?

Anyway, you don't have to publish any names if you don't want to.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        |    IoT architect   [
]     [e-mail]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [





--
Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>, Sandelman Software Works
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