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-Network Working Group S. Woolf
-Internet-Draft Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.
-Expires: September 6, 2006 D. Conrad
- Nominum, Inc.
- March 5, 2006
-
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- Requirements for a Mechanism Identifying a Name Server Instance
- draft-ietf-dnsop-serverid-06
-
-Status of this Memo
-
- By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any
- applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware
- have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes
- aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79.
-
- Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
- Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
- other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
- Drafts.
-
- Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
- and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
- time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
- material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
-
- The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
- http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt.
-
- The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
- http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.
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- This Internet-Draft will expire on September 6, 2006.
-
-Copyright Notice
-
- Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006).
-
-Abstract
-
- With the increased use of DNS anycast, load balancing, and other
- mechanisms allowing more than one DNS name server to share a single
- IP address, it is sometimes difficult to tell which of a pool of name
- servers has answered a particular query. A standardized mechanism to
- determine the identity of a name server responding to a particular
- query would be useful, particularly as a diagnostic aid for
- administrators. Existing ad hoc mechanisms for addressing this need
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- have some shortcomings, not the least of which is the lack of prior
- analysis of exactly how such a mechanism should be designed and
- deployed. This document describes the existing convention used in
- some widely deployed implementations of the DNS protocol, including
- advantages and disadvantages, and discusses some attributes of an
- improved mechanism.
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-1. Introduction and Rationale
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- Identifying which name server is responding to queries is often
- useful, particularly in attempting to diagnose name server
- difficulties. This is most obviously useful for authoritative
- nameservers in the attempt to diagnose the source or prevalence of
- inaccurate data, but can also conceivably be useful for caching
- resolvers in similar and other situations. Furthermore, the ability
- to identify which server is responding to a query has become more
- useful as DNS has become more critical to more Internet users, and as
- network and server deployment topologies have become more complex.
-
- The traditional means for determining which of several possible
- servers is answering a query has traditionally been based on the use
- of the server's IP address as a unique identifier. However, the
- modern Internet has seen the deployment of various load balancing,
- fault-tolerance, or attack-resistance schemes such as shared use of
- unicast IP addresses as documented in [RFC3258]. An unfortunate side
- effect of these schemes has been to make the use of IP addresses as
- identifiers somewhat problematic. Specifically, a dedicated DNS
- query may not go to the same server as answered a previous query,
- even though sent to the same IP address. Non-DNS methods such as
- ICMP ping, TCP connections, or non-DNS UDP packets (such as those
- generated by tools like "traceroute"), etc., may well be even less
- certain to reach the same server as the one which receives the DNS
- queries.
-
- There is a well-known and frequently-used technique for determining
- an identity for a nameserver more specific than the possibly-non-
- unique "server that answered the query I sent to IP address XXX".
- The widespread use of the existing convention suggests a need for a
- documented, interoperable means of querying the identity of a
- nameserver that may be part of an anycast or load-balancing cluster.
- At the same time, however, it also has some drawbacks that argue
- against standardizing it as it's been practiced so far.
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-2. Existing Conventions
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- For some time, the commonly deployed Berkeley Internet Name Domain
- implementation of the DNS protocol suite from the Internet Systems
- Consortium [BIND] has supported a way of identifying a particular
- server via the use of a standards-compliant, if somewhat unusual, DNS
- query. Specifically, a query to a recent BIND server for a TXT
- resource record in class 3 (CHAOS) for the domain name
- "HOSTNAME.BIND." will return a string that can be configured by the
- name server administrator to provide a unique identifier for the
- responding server. (The value defaults to the result of a
- gethostname() call). This mechanism, which is an extension of the
- BIND convention of using CHAOS class TXT RR queries to sub-domains of
- the "BIND." domain for version information, has been copied by
- several name server vendors.
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- A refinement to the BIND-based mechanism, which dropped the
- implementation-specific string, replaces ".BIND" with ".SERVER".
- Thus the query string to learn the unique name of a server may be
- queried as "ID.SERVER".
-
- (For reference, the other well-known name used by recent versions of
- BIND within the CHAOS class "BIND." domain is "VERSION.BIND." A
- query for a CHAOS TXT RR for this name will return an
- administratively defined string which defaults to the version of the
- server responding. This is, however, not generally implemented by
- other vendors.)
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-2.1. Advantages
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- There are several valuable attributes to this mechanism, which
- account for its usefulness.
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- 1. The "HOSTNAME.BIND" or "ID.SERVER" query response mechanism is
- within the DNS protocol itself. An identification mechanism that
- relies on the DNS protocol is more likely to be successful
- (although not guaranteed) in going to the same system as a
- "normal" DNS query.
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- 2. Since the identity information is requested and returned within
- the DNS protocol, it doesn't require allowing any other query
- mechanism to the server, such as holes in firewalls for
- otherwise-unallowed ICMP Echo requests. Thus it is likely to
- reach the same server over a path subject to the same routing,
- resource, and security policy as the query, without any special
- exceptions to site security policy.
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- 3. It is simple to configure. An administrator can easily turn on
- this feature and control the results of the relevant query.
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- 4. It allows the administrator complete control of what information
- is given out in the response, minimizing passive leakage of
- implementation or configuration details. Such details are often
- considered sensitive by infrastructure operators.
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- 5. Hypothetically, since it's an ordinary DNS record and the
- relevant DNSSEC RRs are class independent, the id.server response
- RR could be signed, which has the advantages described in
- [RFC4033].
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-2.2. Disadvantages
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- At the same time, there are some serious drawbacks to the CHAOS/TXT
- query mechanism that argue against standardizing it as it currently
- operates.
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- 1. It requires an additional query to correlate between the answer
- to a DNS query under normal conditions and the supposed identity
- of the server receiving the query. There are a number of
- situations in which this simply isn't reliable.
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- 2. It reserves an entire class in the DNS (CHAOS) for what amounts
- to one zone. While CHAOS class is defined in [RFC1034] and
- [RFC1035], it's not clear that supporting it solely for this
- purpose is a good use of the namespace or of implementation
- effort.
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- 3. The initial and still common form, using .BIND, is implementation
- specific. BIND is one DNS implementation. At the time of this
- writing, it is probably the most prevalent for authoritative
- servers. This does not justify standardizing on its ad hoc
- solution to a problem shared across many operators and
- implementors. Meanwhile, the proposed refinement changes the
- string but preserves the ad hoc CHAOS/TXT mechanism.
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- 4. There is no convention or shared understanding of what
- information an answer to such a query for a server identity could
- or should include, including a possible encoding or
- authentication mechanism.
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- The first of the listed disadvantages may be technically the most
- serious. It argues for an attempt to design a good answer to the
- problem that "I need to know what nameserver is answering my
- queries", not simply a convenient one.
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-2.3. Characteristics of an Implementation Neutral Convention
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- The discussion above of advantages and disadvantages to the
- HOSTNAME.BIND mechanism suggest some requirements for a better
- solution to the server identification problem. These are summarized
- here as guidelines for any effort to provide appropriate protocol
- extensions:
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- 1. The mechanism adopted must be in-band for the DNS protocol. That
- is, it needs to allow the query for the server's identifying
- information to be part of a normal, operational query. It should
- also permit a separate, dedicated query for the server's
- identifying information. But it should preserve the ability of
- the CHAOS/TXT query-based mechanism to work through firewalls and
- in other situations where only DNS can be relied upon to reach
- the server of interest.
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- 2. The new mechanism should not require dedicated namespaces or
- other reserved values outside of the existing protocol mechanisms
- for these, i.e. the OPT pseudo-RR. In particular, it should not
- propagate the existing drawback of requiring support for a CLASS
- and top level domain in the authoritative server (or the querying
- tool) to be useful.
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- 3. Support for the identification functionality should be easy to
- implement and easy to enable. It must be easy to disable and
- should lend itself to access controls on who can query for it.
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- 4. It should be possible to return a unique identifier for a server
- without requiring the exposure of information that may be non-
- public and considered sensitive by the operator, such as a
- hostname or unicast IP address maintained for administrative
- purposes.
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- 5. It should be possible to authenticate the received data by some
- mechanism analogous to those provided by DNSSEC. In this
- context, the need could be met by including encryption options in
- the specification of a new mechanism.
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- 6. The identification mechanism should not be implementation-
- specific.
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-3. IANA Considerations
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- This document proposes no specific IANA action. Protocol extensions,
- if any, to meet the requirements described are out of scope for this
- document. A proposed extension, specified and adopted by normal IETF
- process, is described in [NSID], including relevant IANA action.
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-4. Security Considerations
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- Providing identifying information as to which server is responding to
- a particular query from a particular location in the Internet can be
- seen as information leakage and thus a security risk. This motivates
- the suggestion above that a new mechanism for server identification
- allow the administrator to disable the functionality altogether or
- partially restrict availability of the data. It also suggests that
- the serverid data should not be readily correlated with a hostname or
- unicast IP address that may be considered private to the nameserver
- operator's management infrastructure.
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- Propagation of protocol or service meta-data can sometimes expose the
- application to denial of service or other attack. As DNS is a
- critically important infrastructure service for the production
- Internet, extra care needs to be taken against this risk for
- designers, implementors, and operators of a new mechanism for server
- identification.
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- Both authentication and confidentiality of serverid data are
- potentially of interest to administrators-- that is, operators may
- wish to make serverid data available and reliable to themselves and
- their chosen associates only. This would imply both an ability to
- authenticate it to themselves and keep it private from arbitrary
- other parties. This led to Characteristics 4 and 5 of an improved
- solution.
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-5. Acknowledgements
-
- The technique for host identification documented here was initially
- implemented by Paul Vixie of the Internet Software Consortium in the
- Berkeley Internet Name Daemon package. Comments and questions on
- earlier drafts were provided by Bob Halley, Brian Wellington, Andreas
- Gustafsson, Ted Hardie, Chris Yarnell, Randy Bush, and members of the
- ICANN Root Server System Advisory Committee. The newest version
- takes a significantly different direction from previous versions,
- owing to discussion among contributors to the DNSOP working group and
- others, particularly Olafur Gudmundsson, Ed Lewis, Bill Manning, Sam
- Weiler, and Rob Austein.
-
-6. References
-
- [1] Mockapetris, P., "Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities",
- RFC 1034, STD 0013, November 1987.
-
- [2] Mockapetris, P., "Domain Names - Implementation and
- Specification", RFC 1035, STD 0013, November 1987.
-
- [3] Hardie, T., "Distributing Authoritative Name Servers via Shared
- Unicast Addresses", RFC 3258, April 2002.
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- [4] ISC, "BIND 9 Configuration Reference".
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- [5] Austein, S., "DNS Name Server Identifier Option (NSID)",
- Internet Drafts http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/
- draft-ietf-dnsext-nsid-01.txt, January 2006.
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- [6] Arends, R., Austein, S., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S. Rose,
- "DNS Security Introduction and Requirements", RFC 4033,
- March 2005.
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-Authors' Addresses
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- Suzanne Woolf
- Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.
- 950 Charter Street
- Redwood City, CA 94063
- US
-
- Phone: +1 650 423-1333
- Email: woolf@isc.org
- URI: http://www.isc.org/
-
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- David Conrad
- Nominum, Inc.
- 2385 Bay Road
- Redwood City, CA 94063
- US
-
- Phone: +1 1 650 381 6003
- Email: david.conrad@nominum.com
- URI: http://www.nominum.com/
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-Intellectual Property Statement
-
- The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any
- Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to
- pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in
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-Copyright Statement
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- Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006). This document is subject
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-Acknowledgment
-
- Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
- Internet Society.
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