data request on Sitefinder

Mon Oct 20 21:17:38 UTC 2003

At 5:09 PM -0400 10/20/03, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 16:31:45 EDT, "Steven M. Bellovin" 
><smb at research.att.com>  said:
>>
>>  A number of people havce responded that they don't want to be forced to
>>  pay for a change that will benefit Verisign.  That's a policy issue I'm
>>  trying to avoid here.  I'm looking for pure technical answers -- how
>>  much lead time do you need to make such changes safely?
>
>OK, since you asked....
>
>At least from where I am, the answer will depend *heavily* on whether Verisign
>deploys something that an end-user program can *reliably* detect if it's been
>fed a wildcard it didn't expect.  Note that making a second lookup for '*.foo'
>and comparing the two answers is specifically *NOT* acceptable due 
>to the added
>lookup latency (and to some extent, the attendant race conditions and failure
>modes as well).
>
>Also note that it has to be done in a manner that can be tested by an
>application - there will be a *REAL* need for things like Sendmail to be
>able to test for wildcards *without the assistance* of a patched local DNS.
>
>And yes, this means the minimum lead time to deploy is 'amount of 
>time to write
>a "Wildcard Reply Bit" I-D, advance through IETF to some reasonable point on
>standards track, and then upgrade DNS, end host resolvers, and applications'.

You make an assumption here -- one with which I agree completely -- 
but that certainly wasn't followed during the Sitefinder debacle. The 
assumption is that the IETF provides a tested mechanism for 
disseminating information and making comments.

Verisign claims that they had tested their ideas with a 
Verisign-selected group of organizations, and made their commercial 
decisions based on the proprietary data it generated from those 
organizations.