CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_
Reported by James Galvin/TIS
Minutes of the DNS Security Working Group (DNSSEC)
The DNS Security Working Group met on Tuesday morning for a 2.5 hour
meeting. Donald Eastlake and Charlie Kaufman had previously submitted a
proposal (as an Internet-Draft) for enhancing the DNS to support a
digital signature security service. This meeting was dedicated to a
review of that proposal.
The meeting began with a review of the desired requirements identified
at the BOF meeting held at the November 1993 Houston meeting. Donald
and Charlie then led a presentation and discussion of their proposal.
The following issues were discussed and resolved as indicated.
o Choice of algorithm
The proposal currently specifies the SHA and RSA algorithms. It
was agreed to replace SHA with MD5, the current Internet
preference.
o Revisit DNS architecture
The addition of SIG RRs increases the probability that the maximum
UDP payload per packet may be exceeded. The requirement that we
remain backward compatible with the existing installed base, and
the lack of empirical data to support the premise, caused us to
agree to leave the DNS architecture alone.
o Where do SIG RRs go in the reply
A question was raised as to which section of the reply the SIG RRs
should be placed. This is an issue because it was noted that, if
necessary, implementations may ignore (and truncate) the additional
records portion of a reply.
It was agreed to query Paul Mockapetris in particular and to
follow-up on the mailing list.
o Key-per-zone or key-per-server
The proposal currently specifies that a public/private key pair is
assigned to a zone, which is responsible for signing its data. In
this way the data may be distributed by any server and, in fact,
the actual signing of the data may (and should) occur as an
off-line function. In addition, a specification is included for
servers to optionally sign responses to queries.
At this time it was agreed to leave the optional alternative in the
document. We will revisit this issue after we have some
implementation experience.
o Split the document
It was suggested that the document may be better organized as
several related documents. It was agreed Donald and/or Charlie
would initiate a discussion of this issue on the mailing list.
o Use of the NTP time service
The proposal currently emphasizes (if not requires) the use of a
reliable time service, in particular NTP. It was agreed that DNS
may depend on loosely synchronized clocks, on the order of a few
hours. The authors agreed to rework this aspect of the proposal
and to not mention any particular way of achieving synchronization.
o Partial and/or hash records
The point was raised that the ability to directly include RRs of a
particular type in more than one SIG record was overly complicated
in that it caused the need for the ``partial RR'' signet to be sure
you had all the relevant SIGs. The suggestion was that if all the
RRs of a particular type did not fit directly into one SIG, the use
of a hashed signet be required which would in turn require the RRs
to be present in plain text outside the SIG. It was agreed to wait
for implementation experience to see if this simplification to the
proposal made sense.
o Key management
It was observed that an integral part of the proposal is the
specification of a key management protocol. As the new Security
Area Director was present at the meeting, he was asked if the
Security Area believed it was appropriate to specify another key
management protocol, observing that both PEM and SNMP Security have
also specified key management protocols. The response was that
this key management protocol was sufficiently different from the
other two that it was valuable in its own right and should remain
part of the proposal.
The meeting concluded with Jim Galvin noting that TIS would be
implementing the proposal using the BIND implementation of the DNS as a
baseline. This software would be openly available to the Internet
community.
This group expects to meet in Toronto.
Attendees
Garrett Alexander gda@tycho.ncsc.mil
Robert Austein sra@epilogue.com
Kym Blair kdblair@dockmaster.ncsc.mil
Alexis Bor bora@ct.si.cs.boeing.com
Stephen Bowman srb@nwnet.net
Brad Burdick bburdick@radio.com
John Carlson johnc@cac.washington.edu
Curtis Cox ccox@wnyosi7.nctsw.navy.mil
Matt Crawford crawdad@fncent.fnal.gov
Shane Davis shane@delphi.com
Donald Eastlake dee@lkg.dec.com
Erik Fair fair@apple.com
Antonio Fernandez afa@bellcore.com
Jerome Freedman jfjr@mbunix.mitre.org
James Galvin galvin@tis.com
Chris Gorsuch chrisg@lobby.ti.com
Richard Graveman rfg@ctt.bellcore.com
Art Harkin ash@cup.hp.com
Richard Harris rharris@atc.boeing.com
Marc Hasson marc@mentat.com
Steven Hubert hubert@cac.washington.edu
Christian Huitema Christian.Huitema@sophia.inria.fr
Matthew Jonson jonson@ddn.af.mil
Scott Kaplan scott@wco.ftp.com
Charlie Kaufman kaufman@zk3.dec.com
Stephen Kent kent@bbn.com
Edwin King eek@atc.boeing.com
So Young Lee sylee@hen.nca.go.kr
Steven Lunt lunt@bellcore.com
Bill Manning bmanning@rice.edu
Piers McMahon p.v.mcmahon@rea0803.wins.icl.co.uk
Michael Michnikov mbmg@mitre.org
Greg Minshall minshall@wc.novell.com
Paul Mockapetris pvm@isi.edu
Sandra Murphy murphy@tis.com
Clifford Neuman bcn@isi.edu
Masataka Ohta mohta@cc.titech.ac.jp
Karen Petraska-Veum karen.veum@gsfc.nasa.gov
George Phillips phillips@cs.ubc.ca
Peter Phillips pphillip@cs.ubc.ca
Derrell Piper piper@tgv.com
Michael Ressler mpr@ctt.bellcore.com
William Robertson rob@agate.berkeley.edu
John Romkey romkey@elf.com
Jeffrey Schiller jis@mit.edu
Steven Schnell schnell@sprintlink.net
Doug Schremp dhs@magna.telco.com
Tim Seaver tas@concert.net
William Simpson bsimpson@morningstar.com
Michael St. Johns stjohns@arpa.mil
Shirley Sun suns@centrum.com
Theodore Ts'o tytso@mit.edu
Ruediger Volk rv@informatik.uni-dortmund.de
Dale Walters walters@osi3.ncsl.nist.gov
Walter Wimer ww0n+@andrew.cmu.edu
Dan Zerkle zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu