Subject: Distribution of "." NS bootstrap info

From: Martin Hamilton <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Mar 1998 11:49:50 +0000

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Here's a half serious (and half April fool :-) proposal/ObHack which
Jon Knight and I came up with after a particularly heavy drinking
session the other day.  See what you think...

To keep their bootstrap-time root nameserver hints up to date, what
typically happens at the moment is that people fetch (usually at
irregular intervals) the root cache zone maintained by the InterNIC
and available at <URL:ftp://rs.internic.net/domain/named.root>

An alternative approach would be for this root nameserver cache zone
to be actively "announced".  IP multicast would be a natural mechanism
for this, but (arguably) isn't widely enough deployed as yet.  Another
system which has the necessary characteristics and is very widely
deployed is Usenet News.  In fact, Usenet News already employs a
newsgroup creation/deletion process (control messages) similar to that
which would be desirable for the DNS :-

  * local operator gets to decide "who" can add/remove which
      newsgroups, and who will be ignored
  * strong cryptographic authentication of updates using PGP

Better yet, we have existing running code which would only need minor
modifications for this purpose - pgpverify from David Lawrence et al,
available from the Internet Software Consortium FTP server.
<URL:ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol>

This mechanism *could* in principle also be used for the distribution
of arbitrary updates to DNS information - possibly even to the extent
of subverting the present hierarchical DNS structure :-)

Paradigm shift...

So, we can potentially hand over control of the DNS to the Internet
community in a distributed and decentralized manner.  Some hacks to
BIND might be necessary to make this scheme work properly - e.g.
"sticky hints" that can't be overridden by resource records returned
off the net, and the ability to selectively "poison" the BIND cache by
injecting RRs from a file.

It could be argued that if this change were to actually happen it
would lead to the fragmentation of the Internet namespace, and lots of
interesting/amusing and potentially very expensive naming collisions.
In practice we suspect that this would be unlikely, because of the
immense vested interest the Internet community has in keeping the
existing names operational.

Instead we anticipate something similar to the Usenet control
mechanism developing, whereby most sites would only honour control
messages from a small group of people, typically including say Jon
Postel and Paul Vixie.  Of course, any DNS operator would be free to
ignore control messages from people they didn't like/ trust, though
their users/managers might not appreciate it if bits of the DNS
disappeared because of (say) a childish argument on a mailing list or
a Usenet newsgroup...  This in itself might be enough to prevent
meltdown.

Finally (and this is the real April Fool bit!), although this proposal
may seem superficially attractive, it potentially opens up a nasty can
of legal issues - e.g.

  * Person X sends a control message to delete .com, and the DNS
     operator at site Y trusts them to do this
    Who should .com sites sue ?

  * World government Z believes that it controls "top level domains"
     (or at least its own), but now finds that the Internet has
     routed around it.
    What should it do ?
    What *will* it do ? :-)

Ciao!

Martin

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From: Johnny Eriksson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1998 14:52:55 MET

>      (or at least its own), but now finds that the Internet has

This looks to me like a perfect example of the net routing around a failure.

--Johnny