The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse

Sat Jul 9 18:09:42 UTC 2005

On Sat, Jul 09, 2005 at 01:51:46PM -0400, Todd Vierling wrote:
> On Sat, 9 Jul 2005, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > It's not the *root* operators that are the problem -- it's the *TLD*
> > zone operators.
> 
> Oh, I can certainly agree with that; we've seen some gross abuses of TLDs
> documented in gory detail right here on the NANOG list.
> 
> Of course, that too is orthogonal to who provides the delegations in "." --
> except that perhaps some misguided souls are, as is relatively common,
> confusing the two realms.

Indeed.

> > "infrastructure at risk".  Justify this *far-reaching* statement,
> > please.  Show your work.
> 
> AlterNIC overriding .COM and .NET listings, one of the issues leading to its
> demise.  (This was done in addition to the more memorable cache poisoning
> attacks against INTERNIC.NET.)

To the extent that you don't call that a criminal aberration -- one
that could as easily have happened to one of the root servers currently
*taking* the ICANN root zone -- it only affected people who were
resolving off that root.  That's a pretty small number, and, IMHO,
doesn't rise to the level of "placing the infrastructure [of the entire
net] at risk".

> The risk is uncertainty of name resolution, as the root zone can in fact
> override N-level records simply by posessing a more specific name.  Root
> servers are queried for the full host (but respond with the NS glue
> delegation), not just the first component, which allows for such overriding.

And that possibility is any different in the n-root case than in the
1-root case... why?

> > > Oh wait, your name wouldn't *actually* be Jim Fleming, would it?
> >
> > <chuckle>
> 
> Well, at least some folks remember.  8-)

Whoa, yeah.  My Linux boxes all run IPv8.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

      If you can read this... thank a system administrator.  Or two.  --me