Subject: [dns-privacy] Spencer Dawkins' Yes on draft-ietf-dprive-edns0-padding-02: (with COMMENT)

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Feb 2016 20:38:34 -0800

Spencer Dawkins has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-dprive-edns0-padding-02: Yes

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COMMENT:
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Thanks for producing this draft. I do have one question about this text:

   The PADDING octets SHOULD be set to 0x00.  Other values MAY be used;
   for example, in cases where there is a concern that the padded
   message could be subject to compression before encryption.  PADDING
   octets of any value MUST be accepted in messages received.

I'm not entirely sure I understand the point of "SHOULD be set to 0x00".
I'm not questioning the SHOULD (you explain why choosing another value
would be a good idea, thank you ), but I'm wondering why there's a
normative requirement at all. 

I was trying to guess, and one hypothesis was that if the padding is
consistently 0x00, it's less likely to provide a covert channel (or at
least you'd be more likely to notice packets using different padding),
but the security considerations section didn't mention that, so I'm still
lost.

If there's a reason to zero the padding bytes in the uncompressed case, a
sentence of explanation might be useful.