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Re: Heads-up: IAB statement on the use of wildcards
Harald/all,
First, thanks for the heads-up. I read the document, and
to be honest, it doesn't provide a very clear message,
perhaps with the exception of the bolded text at the end;
basically, use wildcards if you (i). know what you are
doing, and (ii). have the informed consent of the folks
below you. (i). was assumed (one would hope), and
(ii). seems unworkable (e.g., will I have to inform all
of my delegatees (is that a word?) when I say, change
some TTL too?).
So my sense is that this is not much of a position, more
of a description of a problem without ever really stating
what the problem (or putative abuse) was.
Finally, this is not intended to be a criticism, and I am
very glad you folks issued a document around the
issue. Its just that there is not a whole lot of guidance
here (that being said, I really don't know what the legal
constraints would allow).
As usual, $0.02.
Dave
On Fri, Sep 19, 2003 at 03:07:14PM -0700, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>> For your information:
>>
>> The IAB is planning to release the statement below as an IAB statement
>> today, Friday (if possible).
>>
>> As IETF leadership, and as chairs of DNS-related WGs in the IETF, you
>> should know ahead of time.
>>
>> If you find *show-stopper* problems in the below text, yell, of course, but
>> we'd REALLY like to get this puppy out the door....
>>
>> Harald
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Architectural concerns on the use of DNS wildcards
>>
>> There are many architectural assumptions regarding DNS behavior that
>> are not specified in the IETF standards documents describing DNS, but
>> which are deeply embedded in the behavior of Internet protocols and
>> applications. These assumptions are inherent parts of the network
>> architecture of which the DNS is one component.
>>
>> It has long been known that it is possible to use DNS wildcards in
>> ways that violate these assumptions.
>>
>> Recent deployments of DNS wildcards with A records at high levels in
>> the DNS tree have shown by experience that the cost of violating these
>> assumptions is significant. In this document we provide an explanation
>> of how DNS wildcards function, and many examples of how their
>> injudicious use negatively impacts both individual Internet
>> applications and indeed the Internet architecture itself.
>>
>> In particular, we recommend that DNS wildcards should not be used in a
>> zone unless the zone operator has a clear understanding of the risks,
>> and that they should not be used without the informed consent of those
>> entities that are delegated within the zone.
>> _________________________________________________________________
>>
>> A brief primer on DNS wildcards
>>
>> The DNS "wildcard" mechanism has been part of the DNS protocol since
>> the original specifications were written twenty years ago, but the
>> capabilities and limitations of wildcards are sufficiently tricky that
>> discussions of both the protocol details of precisely how wildcards
>> should be implemented and the operational details of how wildcards
>> should or should not be used continue to the present day. This section
>> attempts to explain the essential details of how wildcards work, but
>> readers should refer to the DNS specifications ([RFC 1035] et
>> sequentia) for the full details.
>>
>> In essence, DNS wildcards are rules which enable an authoritative name
>> server to synthesize DNS resource records on the fly. The basic
>> mechanism is quite simple, the complexity is in the details and
>> implications.
>>
>> The most basic and by far the most common operation in the DNS
>> protocols is a simple query for all resource records matching a given
>> query name, query class, and query type. Assuming (for simplicity)
>> that all the software and networks involved are working correctly,
>> such a query will produce one of three possible results:
>>
>> success
>> If the system finds a match for all three parameters, it
>> returns the matching set of resource records;
>>
>> no data
>> If the system finds a match for the query name and query class
>> but not for the query type, it returns an indication that the
>> name exists but no data matching the given query type is
>> present.
>>
>> no such name
>> If the system fails to find a match for the given query name
>> and query class, it returns an indication that the name does
>> not exist.
>>
>> Ordinarily, matches for all three parameters must be exact. This is
>> where wildcards come into the picture.
>>
>> A wildcard record is an otherwise ordinary DNS resource record whose
>> leftmost (least significant) label consists of a single asterisk ("*")
>> character, such as "*.bar.example". Conceptually, the asterisk matches
>> one or more labels at the left (least significant) end of the DNS
>> name.
>>
>> When wildcard records are present, the rules become more complicated.
>> Specifically, if the query class matches, there is no exact match for
>> the query name, and the closest match for the query name is a
>> wildcard, the system in effect synthesizes a set of resource records
>> matching the query name on the fly by treating the resource records
>> present at the wildcard name as if they had been present at the query
>> name. Thus, if the wildcard name has records matching the desired
>> query type, the system will return those records, precisely as in the
>> "success" case case above; otherwise, the system will return an
>> indication that the name exists but no data matching the given query
>> type is present, precisely as in the "no data" case above. The
>> response is identical to that of a normal "success" response for the
>> query name, so the resolver which issued the query can not tell that
>> the results it got back were the result of wildcard expansion.
>>
>> Note that, in the case of a wildcard match, the "no such name" case
>> cannot occur; the wildcard match eliminates this possibility. Note
>> also that only the query name and query class matter for purposes of
>> determining whether a wildcard matches: any record type can produce a
>> wildcard match, regardless of whether or not the record type happens
>> to match the query type.
>> _________________________________________________________________
>>
>> Problems with Wildcard Records
>>
>> One of the main known weaknesses and dangers of wildcard records is
>> that they interact poorly with any use of the DNS which depends on "no
>> such name" responses. The list of such uses turns out to be quite
>> large, and will be discussed in some detail in a later section.
>>
>> Another known weakness and danger of wildcard records stems from the
>> fact that the wildcard label will match anything at all, so long as no
>> non-wildcard name within the zone is a closer match to the query name
>> than the wildcard is. This doesn't sound like a major problem until
>> one considers the number of conventions and, in some cases, protocols,
>> which use labels at the left (least significant) ends of the names of
>> resource records to distinguish between records associated with
>> different services, rather than using different types of records. That
>> is, in these cases, otherwise unrelated services use the same type of
>> record and clients (or users) are expected to use the name
>> corresponding to the particular service desired. This applies both to
>> the ad-hoc naming conventions described in [RFC 2219] such
>> www.foo.example and also to mechanisms such as the SRV record type
>> [RFC 2782] in which the naming scheme is part of the formal protocol.
>> When names of this type are covered by wildcards such as an address
>> record named *.bar.example, such a wildcard would hand back the same
>> address record regardless of the service name encoded in the query
>> name, thus ftp.foo.bar.example, mail.foo.bar.example,
>> ntp.foo.bar.example and so forth would all end up with the same
>> synthesized address record. This problem is even worse in the SRV
>> case, both because names such as _finger._tcp.foo.bar.example are part
>> of the protocol and because SRV records include TCP and UDP port
>> numbers, so the client will be confused not only about which host it
>> should contact but also about the port on which it should contact that
>> host. The only way to avoid these problems with names of this type is
>> to add explicit records for such names to the DNS.
>>
>> Finally, the two factors listed above ("match anything" behavior, and
>> poor interaction with anything that depends on "no such name"
>> responses) interact with normal and predictable human errors to allow
>> wildcards to have effects far beyond their intended scope. Properly
>> speaking, a wildcard record's scope is limited to a single zone,
>> since, by definition, a wildcard record never matches any name that
>> really does exist in the zone, and thus will not match any
>> (non-wildcard) delegation of a portion of the namespace from a parent
>> zone to its child. (Wildcard NS records, while theoretically possible,
>> have sufficiently bizzare semantics that it is probably best to limit
>> their use to torture-tests of DNS software.) So, at first blush, it
>> would seem that the administrator of a zone is free to use wildcards
>> without worrying about effects which this might have on the zone's
>> delegated children. Unfortunately, this turns out not to be the case,
>> because DNS names are heavily exposed in user interfaces, and users,
>> being humans, make mistakes. So, while delegating the bar.example zone
>> will prevent a wildcard record *.example from affecting a user who
>> typed foo.bar.example as foi.bar.example, it will not prevent the same
>> wildcard record from affecting the same user when the error is
>> foo.bat.example. Thus, from the users' point of view, some of the
>> effects of wildcards do leak from a parent zone to its children. This
>> is not a big deal if the parent and child zones are associated with a
>> single organization, but it can become a real problem if the parent
>> and child zones are associated with different organizations whose
>> interests are not perfectly aligned.
>>
>> The above is probably not an exhaustive list. Even after twenty years
>> of experience with the DNS, the effects of unexpected uses of
>> wildcards can still be quite surprising, because the small but
>> fundamental way in which they change the record lookup rules has a
>> nasty way of violating implicit (or, sometimes, explicit) assumptions
>> in deployed DNS-using software.
>>
>> For these reasons, almost all use of DNS wildcards has been limited to
>> a relatively small number of reasonably well-understood roles, and
>> most wildcard use has been limited to a single role: the MX records
>> used in mail delivery.
>>
>> Since MX records are only used for electronic mail delivery, wildcard
>> MX records are relatively safe, and since electronic mail for any
>> particular DNS name is generally handed by the organization that is
>> furthest down the delegation tree, wildcard MX records are most likely
>> to appear in zones where their effects will not cross organizational
>> boundaries. While the latter is not universally true, the primary use
>> of wildcard records has been and remains wildcard MX records for
>> handling an organization's own mail.
>>
>> Given these issues, it seems clear that the use of wildcards with
>> record types that affect more than one protocol should be approached
>> with caution, that the use of wildcards in situations where their
>> effects cross organizational boundaries should also be approached with
>> caution, and that the use of wildcards with record types that affect
>> more than one protocol in situations where the effects cross
>> organizational boundaries should be approached with extreme caution,
>> if at all.
>> _________________________________________________________________
>>
>> Principles To Keep In Mind
>>
>> In reading the rest of this document, it may be helpful to bear in
>> mind two basic principles of architectural design which have served
>> the Internet well for many years:
>> * The Robustness Principle: "Be conservative in what you do, be
>> liberal in what you accept from others." [Jon Postel, RFC793]
>> * The Principle Of Least Astonishment: A program should always
>> respond in the way that is least likely to astonish the user.
>> [Traditional, original source unknown]
>>
>> We will come back to these points after the next section.
>> _________________________________________________________________
>>
>> Problems encountered in a recent experiment with wildcards
>>
>> We have recently had the opportunity to observe the results of an
>> experiment on use of wildcards in large top-level domains, with some
>> rather undesirable and unintended consequences. This section attempts
>> to detail some of the problems that network users and operators around
>> the world encountered as a result of this deployment.
>>
>> We must emphasize that, technically, this was a legitimate use of
>> wildcard records that did not in any way violate the DNS
>> specifications themselves. One of our main points here is that simply
>> complying with the letter of the protocol specification is not
>> sufficient to ensure the operational stability of the applications
>> which depend on the DNS: there are protocol features which simply are
>> not safe to use in some circumstances.
>>
>> The specific change which this operator chose to make was to add a
>> single wildcard address record at the zone apex of each of these two
>> zones. As a direct result of this change, two things happened:
>> 1. the authoritative servers for these two zones no longer give out
>> "no such name" responses for any possible name in these zones, and
>> 2. every possible name rooted in one of these zones which, until this
>> change, did not exist at all, now has a synthesized address record
>> pointing at a "redirection server" run by the operator of this
>> zone.
>>
>> The implications of this simple change were many and varied. The list
>> below is almost certainly incomplete:
>>
>> Web Browsing
>>
>> Web browsers all over the world stopped displaying "page not found" in
>> the local language and character set of the users when given incorrect
>> URLs rooted under these TLDs. Instead, these browsers now display an
>> English language search page from a web server run by the zone
>> operator.
>>
>> It should be noted that the language tags in the HTTP protocol do not
>> always match the locale used in the local browser. So, even though the
>> global search page is dynamic and uses the information in the HTTP
>> request to guess what language and script is to be used -- it will
>> never be able to emulate what the user expected. There is, in short,
>> not enough context in the HTTP protocol for the engine which generates
>> the search page.
>>
>> In many situations, web browsers have been written to provide some
>> assistance to the user, often based on local conventions, directories,
>> and language, when a DNS lookup fails. All such systems are now
>> disabled for URLs rooted under these TLDs, since DNS lookups no longer
>> fail, even when the specified destination does not exist.
>>
>> Even if these were acceptable changes, the new mechanism has poor
>> scaling properties, and unless the operator chooses to invest
>> significant resources in maintaining a large, robust web server setup,
>> the user experience is going to get even worse: instead of either a
>> local language error message or an English search page, the user is
>> going to get "attempting to connect..." followed by a long wait.
>>
>> Email
>>
>> All mail to non-existent hostnames under these TLDs now flows to the
>> registry operator's server, where the registry operator bounces it.
>> Some operators find this intolerable and have changed their mail
>> system configurations to bypass this "bounce service", but the vast
>> majority of mail servers undoubtedly now route mail for nonexistent
>> names under these TLDs to the bounce server rather than just bouncing
>> it directly. This has a number of ramifications:
>> * If operators choose to allow their mail to go to the bounce
>> server, they now have an increased mail load handling additional
>> routing of messages to the bounce server; if operators choose not
>> to allow this to happen, they have an additional development and
>> maintenance burden configuring their servers to prevent it.
>> * Operators who allow mail to go to the bounce server are now
>> dependent on the performance of the bounce server. If the bounce
>> server ever slows or fails, mail that previously would bounce will
>> now queue at the SMTP relay for that relay's queue time before
>> bouncing back to the user. This creates a very poor user
>> experience, since typographical errors that in the past would have
>> bounced immediately may now go unnoticed for several days.
>> * Operators who allow mail to go to the bounce server are also
>> dependent on the correct operation of the bounce server. If the
>> bounce server is buggy (which happened to be the case with this
>> rollout), mail may not bounce at all: it may be reported to the
>> user as having been delivered correctly while actually vanishing
>> without a trace. This also creates a very poor user experience.
>> * In some cases where the set of MX records associated with a
>> particular DNS name included a misconfigured record pointing to a
>> nonexistent hostname, installing these wildcard records was the
>> last straw that broke a misconfigured-but-functional mail
>> configuration: previously, the nonexistent hostname would have
>> failed to resolve and been ignored, now it bounces.
>> * The normal flow of data from a client in SMTP when one address has
>> a typo is as follows:
>> 1. The client looks up the IP address of his outgoing SMTP proxy
>> in DNS.
>> 2. The client opens a TCP connection to his outgoing SMTP proxy.
>> 3. The client sends information about himself to the SMTP proxy.
>> 4. The proxy accepts or rejects the client.
>> 5. The client sends information about the recipient to the SMTP
>> proxy.
>> 6. The proxy look up the destination in DNS, and gets "no such
>> name" back.
>> 7. The proxy sends information to the client that the address is
>> wrong.
>> With a wildcard for mistyped domain, the following happens:
>> 1. The client looks up the IP address of his outgoing SMTP proxy
>> in DNS.
>> 2. The client opens a TCP connection to his outgoing SMTP proxy.
>> 3. The client sends information about himself to the SMTP proxy.
>> 4. The proxy accepts or rejects the client.
>> 5. The client sends information about the recipient to the SMTP
>> proxy.
>> 6. The proxy looks up the destination in DNS, and gets "success"
>> back.
>> 7. The proxy accepts the message and closes the connection to
>> the client.
>> 8. The proxy opens a TCP connection to the bounce server.
>> 9. The proxy present himself to the bounce server.
>> 10. The bounce server indicates that the recipient address is not
>> acceptable.
>> 11. The proxy generates an error message which is sent back to
>> the sender's email address.
>> * A different scenario happens if the SMTP client has been
>> misconfigured with the incorrect name of the outgoing SMTP proxy.
>> As the domain name resolves using a wildcard, the client will
>> connect to the bounce server, and start to send mail to it. The
>> result is that the bounce server (at the IP address of the
>> wildcard) says that the recipient address is wrong even though it
>> is in fact correct. The error presented to the user is incorrect,
>> as it is the name of the outgoing proxy which was wrong and not
>> the name of the recipient.
>>
>> Informing Users of Errors
>>
>> Many application GUIs check domain names for validity before allowing
>> the user to progress to the next step. Examples include email clients
>> that directly check the domain of the email addresses resolves before
>> sending, and network printer configuration tools that check that the
>> print spooler name is valid before accepting the configuration.
>> Previously the user would be prompted early that they had made an
>> error in the domain name. In the case of email, the error may now not
>> be noticed at the time of sending, but only when email later bounces.
>> In the case of the printer configuration, the error may not be noticed
>> during configuration, but only afterwards when printing fails to work,
>> where the problem diagnosis is more difficult.
>>
>> Spam Filters
>> Installing these wildcard records broke several simple spam filters
>> commonly used to front end inbound mail servers, as well as more
>> complex filtering that checks for the existence of a sending domain in
>> order to screen out obviously bogus senders. This technique for spam
>> has diminished as this filtering mechanism has increased, but one
>> sample operator reports that it still equals about 10% of inbound mail
>> attempts on their large shared MX cluster. ISPs who are aware of this
>> problem will probably extend their filtering rules to have special
>> knowledge of the address returned by these wildcard records, but will
>> have to carry the cost of doing so, both in terms of code maintenance
>> and increased execution time for their filtering.
>>
>> Interactions with Other Protocols
>>
>> The wildcard address records trap lookups for any network service, but
>> the number of protocols somewhere in use on the Internet (including
>> private protocols used between two or more parties on ports which they
>> may or may not have registered with IANA) is large enough that it
>> simply is not possible for the zone operator (or anyone) to provide a
>> redirection service for every protocol. In this particular example,
>> the zone operator only provided handlers for HTTP (which they directed
>> to a search page) and SMTP (which they attempted to bounce). All other
>> protocols received at best TCP resets, or, in some cases, simply had
>> their packets dropped. Any application that uses the DNS has (or
>> should have) some way of handling "no such name" errors; in almost all
>> cases the error message is sufficiently clear to an experienced user
>> that it is immediately obvious when the application has failed because
>> it was given an incorrect DNS name. With these wildcard records in
>> place, however, incorrect DNS names which are matched by the wildcard
>> record will not show up as DNS name errors at all, but instead will
>> show up as mysterious connection failures or as unreachable
>> destinations for all services that the zone operator does not
>> redirect. Depending on the details of the application protocol and
>> implementation involved, this change may also convert an obvious "hard
>> failure" (incorrect name) into a soft failure which the application
>> thinks it should retry, as seen above in the email case. This may
>> result in very long delays, perhaps of days or weeks, before even
>> trivial errors are brought to the user's attention. Transport
>> protocols using UDP may also retry until the transport protocol retry
>> limit is reached (especially if ICMP messages are being filtered at a
>> firewall), which may be very considerably longer than the time it
>> would have taken to return an error to the user indicating they
>> mistyped the destination.
>>
>> Automated Tools
>>
>> Automated or embedded tools which use HTTP but which do not have a
>> user interface may also be confused by this change, since such tools
>> may expect configuration failures to show up as DNS errors and may not
>> realize that the HTTP response they have received from the zone
>> operator's search page is not the page which the tool expected to
>> reach. Such tools may fail in unpredictable ways, and may not be easy
>> to upgrade.
>>
>> Charging
>>
>> The current response from the service in question is just over 17
>> KBytes of data because the client has to open a TCP connection and
>> receive a not insignificant amount of data. A "no such data" response
>> would have fitted in one packet. In the case of volume-based charging
>> for Internet Access (as with most cellular data services) the
>> recipient will have to pay additional charges.
>>
>> Single Point of Failure
>>
>> Even for cases in which the redirection service works as intended,
>> such a service creates a very large single point of failure. Single
>> points of failure are obvious targets both for deliberate attacks and
>> for the sort of accidental "attacks" caused by bugs and configuration
>> errors which already generate much of the traffic at the DNS name
>> servers for the root zone. Furthermore, the IP address associated with
>> this single point of failure is a likely target both for routing
>> attacks intended to redirect the IP address to some other server.
>>
>> Privacy
>>
>> An interception service with this kind of scope raises significant
>> privacy concerns, since traffic received by the interception service
>> is, pretty much by definition, not going where its sender originally
>> intended. The potential for abuse in this situation is very high, and
>> makes the interception service an even more attractive target, this
>> time for attackers who wish to gain control of it in order to practice
>> such abuse.
>>
>> Reserved Names
>>
>> This sort of wildcard usage is incompatible with any use of DNS which
>> relies on reserving names in a registry with the express intent of not
>> adding them to the DNS zone itself. An example of such a use is the
>> JET-derived IDN approach of "registry restrictions" and "reserved
>> names", which depends on the existence of names that are reserved and
>> can be registered only by the holder of some related name, but which
>> do not appear in the DNS. By some readings of the current ICANN IDN
>> policy, support for that "reserved name" approach is required. To
>> accomplish the goal of reduced consumer confusion, the reserved names
>> must not be resolvable at all. This reserved name approach appears to
>> be completely incompatible with this sort of wildcard usage: since the
>> wildcard will always cause a result to be returned, even for a
>> reserved name which does not appear in the zone, one can support
>> either one or the other, but not both.
>>
>> Undesirable Workarounds
>>
>> ISPs have responded to the deployment of these wildcards in a number
>> of ways, all of which are both understandable and worrisome. Some ISPs
>> have contemplated modifying their routing systems to drop all packets
>> destined to the zone operator's redirection server into a black hole.
>> Others have deployed patches to their DNS resolvers which attempt to
>> reverse the effects of these wildcard records. Still other ISPs have
>> considered using this as an opportunity to play the same game that the
>> zone operator is playing, but for the ISP's own benefit. All of these
>> responses are both understandable and predictable, but none of them
>> are good. Even more worrisome is that different ISPs are taking
>> different approaches to dealing with this, which may lead to a
>> balkanization problem and create an ongoing headache for anyone having
>> to deal with cross-network DNS or application debugging.
>> _________________________________________________________________
>>
>> Principles, Conclusions, and Recommendations
>>
>> The Robustness principle tells us that in some (not all) of the
>> problems detailed above, both parties could be construed as being at
>> fault. In some cases this is hardly surprising: spam filtering in
>> particular, by its nature, tends to be extremely ad hoc and somewhat
>> fragile. No doubt there are lessons here for all parties involved.
>>
>> The Principle of Least Astonishment suggests that the deployment of
>> wildcards was disastrous for the users. It had widesweeping effects on
>> other users of the Internet far beyond those enumerated by the zone
>> operator, created several brand new problems, and caused other
>> internet entities to make hasty, possibly mutually incompatible and
>> possibly deleterious (to the internet as a whole) changes to their own
>> operations in an attempt to react to the change.
>>
>> Note that these considerations apply to any wildcard deployment of
>> this type. The list of problems encountered in this case clearly
>> demonstrates that, although wildcard records are part of the base DNS
>> protocol, there are situations in which it simply is not safe to use
>> them. As noted in an earlier section, two warning flags suggesting
>> that this type of wildcard deployment is dangerous were that
>> a. it affected more than one protocol, and
>> b. it was done high enough up in the DNS hierarchy that its effects
>> were not limited to the organization that chose to deploy these
>> wildcard records.
>>
>> Note also that a significant component of some of the listed problems
>> was not precisely the wildcard-induced behavior per se so much as it
>> was the abrupt change in the behavior of a long established
>> infrastructure mechanism.
>>
>> In conclusion, we would like to propose a guideline for when wildcard
>> records should be considered too risky to deploy, and make a few
>> recommendations on how to proceed from here.
>>
>> Proposed guideline: If you want to use wildcards in your zone and
>> understand the risks, go ahead, but only do so with the informed
>> consent of the entities that are delegated within your zone.
>>
>> Generally, we do not recommend the use of wildcards for record types
>> that affect more than one application protocol. At the present time,
>> the only record types that do not affect more than one application
>> protocol are MX records.
>>
>> For zones which do delegations, we do not recommend even wildcard MX
>> records. If they are used, the owners of zones delegated from that
>> zone must be made aware of that policy and must be given assistance to
>> ensure appropriate behavior for MX names within the delegated zone. In
>> other words, the parent zone operator must not reroute mail destined
>> for the child zone without the child zone's permission.
>>
>> We hesitate to recommend a flat prohibition against wildcards in
>> "registry"-class zones, but strongly suggest that the burden of proof
>> in such cases should be on the registry to demonstrate that their
>> intended use of wildcards will not pose a threat to stable operation
>> of the DNS or predictable behavior for applications and users.
>>
>> We recommend that any and all TLDs which use wildcards in a manner
>> inconsistent with this guideline remove such wildcards at the earliest
>> opportunity.
>> _________________________________________________________________
>>
>> Acknowledgements
>>
>> The IAB gratefully acknowledges the kind assistance of David Schairer,
>> John Curran, John Klensin, and Steve Bellovin for helpful suggestions
>> and, in some cases, significant chunks of text. None of these
>> contributors bear any responsibility for what the IAB has done with
>> their contributions. We note that Leslie Daigle reclused herself from
>> the process of producing this document.
>>
>>