Catching up from last week I saw this article in Techworld (from NetworkWorld) about an IETF meeting to discuss the impact of Dan Kaminsky’s DNS exploit and potential strategies for hardening DNS.

The election season may be over, but it’s good to see politics still hard at work:

One option is for the IETF to do nothing about the Kaminsky bug. Some participants at the DNS Extensions working group meeting this week referred to all of the proposals as a “hack” and argued against spending time developing one of them into a standard because it could delay DNSSEC deployment. Other participants said it was irresponsible for the IETF to do nothing about the Kaminsky bug because large sections of the DNS will never deploy DNSSEC. “We can do the hack and it might work in the short term, but when DNSSEC gets widely used, we’ll still be stuck with the hack,” said IETF participant Scott Rose, a DNSSEC expert with the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).

Look, any change to DNS is huge and likely ugly, but it’s disappointing that there seems to be a large contingent that wants to use this situation to push the DNSSEC agenda without exploring other options. DNSSEC is massive, complex, ugly, and prone to its own failures. You can read more about DNSSEC problems at this older series over at Matasano (Part 1, Part 2, site currently experiencing some problems, should be back soon).

The end of the article does offer some hope:

The co-chairs of the DNS Extensions working group said they hope to make a decision on whether to change the DNS protocols in light of the Kaminsky bug before the group’s next meeting in March. ” We want to avoid creating a long-term problem that is caused by a hasty decision,” Sullivan said. “There are big reasons to be careful here. The DNS is a really old protocol and it is fundamental to the Internet. We’re not talking about patching software. We’re talking about patching a protocol. We want to make sure that whatever we do doesn’t break the Internet.”

Good- at least the chairs understand that rushing headlong into DNSSEC may not be the answer. We might end up there anyway, but let’s make damn sure it’s the right thing to do first.

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