With the recent announcement that OpenDNS will support DNSCurve, I've begun hearing more questions about it.  In particular, people wonder whether DNSCurve is a viable alternative to DNSSEC.  They've generally heard that DNSCurve is simpler to set up than DNSSEC and involves less overhead.

Unfortunately, DNSCurve isn't an alternative to DNSSEC - although it could conceivably complement DNSSEC, in ways I'll discuss.

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I feel like at least half of my postings to this blog have been about DNSSEC (and for those of you uninterested in DNSSEC, I'm sorry).  But one DNSSEC-related topic I haven't brought up is the "last mile."

In DNSSEC, the "last mile" refers to communications between the stub resolver and the recursive name server.  The stub resolver is the piece of the Domain Name System that resides on nearly every computer and translates an application's request for data (say the address of www.infoblox.com) into a DNS query, and then sends that query to one or more name servers.  The recursive name server receives a resolver's query, examines its cache for the answer, and if it doesn't find the answer there, may need to send one or more queries to remote name servers.

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'Tis the season for new year's predictions, and my blog will be no exception.  Some of these predictions are fairly safe bets, like the signing of the root zone and the introduction of internationalized top-level domains.  Others are more speculative.

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Just yesterday, ISC announced the release of several versions of BIND to address a new vulnerability.  The vulnerability could allow unsigned data to be cached on a recursive name server configured to perform DNSSEC validation.

While that's alarming, it's not a systemic problem with DNSSEC; it's simply a flaw in BIND's implementation of DNSSEC.  (How could it be anything else if it was addressed by releasing new versions?)  Implementations of the latest incarnation of DNSSEC are still relatively new, so it should come as no surprise that we're still finding flaws.  (I'm proud to say that this particular defect was found by Michael Sinatra, who works for my alma mater, Berkeley.)

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Most of the results of our recent DNS Survey were pretty scary, especially the news that nearly 80% of the name servers we found in our sweep of 5% of the Internet's address space were open to recursion.  But the results contained some good news, too, and for that we should be thankful.

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