Greasing Protocol Extension Points in the DNS
draft-ietf-dnsop-grease-02
| Document | Type | Active Internet-Draft (dnsop WG) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authors | Shumon Huque , Mark P. Andrews | ||
| Last updated | 2025-11-02 | ||
| Replaces | draft-huque-dnsop-grease | ||
| RFC stream | Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) | ||
| Intended RFC status | (None) | ||
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draft-ietf-dnsop-grease-02
Internet Engineering Task Force S. Huque
Internet-Draft Salesforce
Intended status: Informational M. Andrews
Expires: 6 May 2026 Internet Systems Consortium
2 November 2025
Greasing Protocol Extension Points in the DNS
draft-ietf-dnsop-grease-02
Abstract
Long term evolvability of the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol
requires the ability to support change. Greasing is one technique
that exercises the regular use of unallocated protocol extension
points to prevent ossification of their current usage patterns by
middleboxes or DNS implementations. This document describes
considerations and proposals for applying grease to the DNS protocol.
Discussion Venues
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
https://github.com/ietf-wg-dnsop/draft-ietf-dnsop-grease.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 6 May 2026.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2025 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Greasing Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. Randomized or Reserved code points . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. Reserved Code Point Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6. Sampled Selection of Traffic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7. Telemetry and Results Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
8. Detailed Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
9. Greasing Initiated By DNS Responders . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
11. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
12. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
12.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
12.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1. Introduction
Long term evolvability of the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol
requires the ability to support change. Greasing [GREASING] is one
technique that exercises the regular use of unallocated protocol
extension points to prevent ossification of their current usage
patterns by middleboxes or DNS implementations.
Greasing was originally developed for the TLS protocol [RFC8701].
Ongoing discussion of improving the technique as well as applying it
more generally to other protocols continues in the IETF.
This document outlines considerations and proposals for applying
grease to the [RFC1034][RFC1035] Domain Name System (DNS).
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2. Background
Historically, DNS protocol evolution has encountered some significant
barriers. There are various reasons, including outdated systems,
inertia, faulty implementations of DNS servers, middleboxes that have
actively blocked the deployment of new protocol features, etc. Over
time as some of these impediments have been uncovered and repaired,
progress has been possible. However, a more systematic approach to
ensure future progress is desirable.
Remarkably, the Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS) specification,
originally published in 1999 [RFC2671], is still not universally
deployed, and often deployed incorrectly or incompletely. This
eventually resulted in the exercise of a DNS Flag Day effort
[FLAGDAY] to identify and eradicate implementations and network paths
not compliant with the specification. Tools like ednscomp.isc.org
[EDNSCOMP] have been testing this and other protocol defects in
deployed infrastructure for many years. Even then, some level of
incorrect behavior remains prevalent, necessitating probing and pre-
arrangement of the use of some extension features like [RFC7871]EDNS
Client Subnet and [RFC7873]DNS Cookies.
3. Greasing Opportunities
The DNS has a number of protocol elements where the greasing of
unallocated code points could be employed. Some of them are listed
in the table below.
+======================+=========+==================+
| Protocol Element | Size | Number of Values |
+======================+=========+==================+
| DNS Header Flags | 7-bits | 7 |
+----------------------+---------+------------------+
| Resource Record Type | 16-bits | 65,536 |
+----------------------+---------+------------------+
| Opcode | 4-bits | 16 |
+----------------------+---------+------------------+
| EDNS Version | 8-bits | 256 |
+----------------------+---------+------------------+
| EDNS Header Flags | 16-bits | 16 |
+----------------------+---------+------------------+
| EDNS Opt Code | 16-bits | 65,536 |
+----------------------+---------+------------------+
Table 1
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The goals of periodically exercising the use of unallocated code
points are (1) to discourage and prevent middleboxes and DNS
implementations from hardcoding notions of what are the only
allowable protocol parameter values, and (2) to prevent future
extensibility failures by not causing them to malfunction in the
presence of new values when they are defined.
If and when encrypted transports are common on the DNS resolver to
authoritative server path, middleboxes will have less capability to
interfere with DNS traffic. Greasing would still however continue to
be useful for identifying deficient DNS proxies, load balancers,
authoritative servers, etc.
Note that EDNS [RFC6891] options have a more complex structure
involving both a code point and data. So greasing EDNS options would
also require generating some random option data.
Correctly implemented DNS servers will ignore these values and
interoperate. Servers that do not tolerate unknown values will fail
to interoperate and return an error (or may fail to respond). These
failures could be logged and be used to identify broken
implementations in the field that could be targeted for repair. DNS
resolvers should generally retry such failed queries without the
unallocated extension, except for greasing operations where new
queries are constructed (for example, greasing new resource record
types).
4. Randomized or Reserved code points
DNS resolver implementations are proposed to periodically advertise
unallocated code points at random in requests that they send out.
Resolvers could select randomly from the unallocated range, but then
would have to consider what happens when such code points are
allocated in the future and whether or not that will give rise to a
different class of interoperability failure. One possible way to
deal with this is for software to have pre-configured or configurable
end-of-test dates.
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Alternatively, a subset of the currently unused values could be
reserved for DNS resolver implementations to advertise at random.
The expectation is that receivers will have uniform handling of
unknown code points whether they fall in a reserved range or not.
But there is a slight risk that the reserved values could then become
ossified in implementations. Furthermore, Some DNS protocol elements
have only a small range of supported values, and it may not be
practical to reserve a a subset of such ranges. Some larger ranges
also have a sub structure, such as the data vs meta vs q-type
classification of the RR-type space, where multiple greasing ranges
would need to be reserved.
5. Reserved Code Point Values
[Propose reserved ranges for some DNS protocol elements]
6. Sampled Selection of Traffic
To avoid the overhead of needing to retry many queries in the event
of large scale intolerance of unallocated code points, only a sampled
fraction of DNS requests emitted by a resolver should advertise
unallocated code points. Many DNS resolvers are very high
transaction rate systems, so only a small sample size of such DNS
requests is sufficient to get a rough picture of non-compliant
servers, perhaps 1 in 1000 requests? Furthermore, a community effort
of aggregating and analysing the results of failed queries from many
DNS resolver operators can provide an even more comprehensive view of
the ecosystem.
7. Telemetry and Results Evaluation
DNS resolvers are expected to record the results of failures from the
use of unallocated code points. This could be in a traditional log
file, or a more complex centralized telemetry system.
Additionally, the DNS Error Reporting [ERROR-RPT] mechanism could be
employed to proactively notify operators that their authoritative DNS
servers are deficient.
8. Detailed Behavior
Work in-progress section .. Some topics to expand on:
* Detailed expected behavior of DNS resolvers/clients.
* Detailed expected behavior of DNS servers.
* Detection of errors.
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* Fallback behavior (or not).
* Settings: nameservers should be shipped with a default end-of-test
date to prevent tests from interfering with future code point
assignments.
* Testing should be multi-factored.
* Tests should be able to be individually disabled.
* Sharing telemetry.
9. Greasing Initiated By DNS Responders
This document largely focusses on greasing initiated by the DNS
resolver or querier. Greasing operations could also be initiated by
an authoritative server or DNS responder. This seems potentially a
bit more fraught, since the responder cannot necessarily know what
the result of the greasing action was, e.g., did the querier accept
the answer with no problems, did it not accept it and retry other
servers, did it not not accept it and just fail, causing a denial of
service to the downstream application, etc. However, greasing in
this direction can be very helpful in targeted experiments. For
example, some early measurements for DELEG proposals utilized server
side greasing to insert unexpected record types in referral responses
to test the behavior of DNS resolvers. Operators of DNS zones could
perform targeted active measurements or rely on reports by users to
determine if server side greasing works well.
Some things a responder could do include: test setting the final DNS
header flag (Z), send back unknown EDNS header flags, options. higher
EDNS versions etc. All of these should in theory be ignored on
reception.
Greasing by DNS responders should be disabled by default.
10. Security Considerations
If an implementation does not select GREASE values at random, it may
allow others to fingerprint specific resolvers or resolver
implementations.
Some DNS resolver implementations have traditionally resorted to
falling back to retrying queries with various extension options
disabled in the face of interoperability problems. Depending on the
specific extension affected, this may allow an adversary to silently
disable a security feature. Greasing of unallocated code points aims
to identify such interoperability problems and help DNS resolver
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operators and implementations to decide when it is ok to disable
fallback behavior for future extensions. Hence, this mechanism is
expected to generally reduce the need for resolver fallback behavior,
and improve security over time.
11. IANA Considerations
[If reserved code point ranges are decided, IANA will need to
formally reserve them in the relevant protocol parameter registries.
The annotation "Reserved for Greasing" should be employed to clearly
distinguish such ranges from other ranges that might be reserved for
private use or other purposes.]
12. References
12.1. Normative References
[RFC1034] Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - concepts and facilities",
STD 13, RFC 1034, DOI 10.17487/RFC1034, November 1987,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1034>.
[RFC1035] Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - implementation and
specification", STD 13, RFC 1035, DOI 10.17487/RFC1035,
November 1987, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1035>.
[RFC6891] Damas, J., Graff, M., and P. Vixie, "Extension Mechanisms
for DNS (EDNS(0))", STD 75, RFC 6891,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6891, April 2013,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6891>.
12.2. Informative References
[EDNSCOMP] Consortium, I. S., "EDNS Compliance Tester",
<https://ednscomp.isc.org/>.
[ERROR-RPT]
Arends, R. and M. Larson, "DNS Error Reporting",
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-
dns-error-reporting>.
[FLAGDAY] Consortium, I. S., "DNS Flag Day 2019",
<https://www.isc.org/blogs/dns-flag-day/>.
[GREASING] Pardue, L., "Maintaining Protocols Using Grease and
Variability", <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/
draft-edm-protocol-greasing>.
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[RFC2671] Vixie, P., "Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS0)",
RFC 2671, DOI 10.17487/RFC2671, August 1999,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2671>.
[RFC7871] Contavalli, C., van der Gaast, W., Lawrence, D., and W.
Kumari, "Client Subnet in DNS Queries", RFC 7871,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7871, May 2016,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7871>.
[RFC7873] Eastlake 3rd, D. and M. Andrews, "Domain Name System (DNS)
Cookies", RFC 7873, DOI 10.17487/RFC7873, May 2016,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7873>.
[RFC8701] Benjamin, D., "Applying Generate Random Extensions And
Sustain Extensibility (GREASE) to TLS Extensibility",
RFC 8701, DOI 10.17487/RFC8701, January 2020,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8701>.
Authors' Addresses
Shumon Huque
Salesforce
Email: shuque@gmail.com
Mark Andrews
Internet Systems Consortium
Email: marka@isc.org
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