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Serving Stale Data to Improve DNS Resiliency
draft-ietf-dnsop-serve-stale-03

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 8767.
Authors David C Lawrence , Warren "Ace" Kumari , Puneet Sood
Last updated 2019-02-23 (Latest revision 2018-10-14)
Replaces draft-tale-dnsop-serve-stale
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draft-ietf-dnsop-serve-stale-03
DNSOP Working Group                                          D. Lawrence
Internet-Draft                                                    Oracle
Updates: 1034, 1035 (if approved)                              W. Kumari
Intended status: Standards Track                                 P. Sood
Expires: August 27, 2019                                          Google
                                                       February 23, 2019

              Serving Stale Data to Improve DNS Resiliency
                    draft-ietf-dnsop-serve-stale-03

Abstract

   This draft defines a method for recursive resolvers to use stale DNS
   data to avoid outages when authoritative nameservers cannot be
   reached to refresh expired data.  It updates the definition of TTL
   from [RFC1034], [RFC1035], and [RFC2181] to make it clear that data
   can be kept in the cache beyond the TTL expiry and used for responses
   when a refreshed answer is not readily available.  One of the
   motivations for serve-stale is to make the DNS more resilient to DoS
   attacks, and thereby make them less attractive as an attack vector.

Ed note

   Text inside square brackets ([]) is additional background
   information, answers to frequently asked questions, general musings,
   etc.  They will be removed before publication.  This document is
   being collaborated on in GitHub at <https://github.com/vttale/serve-
   stale>.  The most recent version of the document, open issues, etc
   should all be available here.  The authors gratefully accept pull
   requests.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on August 27, 2019.

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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2019 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   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 and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Background  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  Standards Action  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   5.  Example Method  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   6.  Implementation Caveats  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     6.1.  Implementation Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   7.  Implementation Status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   8.  EDNS Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   9.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   10. Privacy Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   11. NAT Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   12. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   13. Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   14. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     14.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     14.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11

1.  Introduction

   Traditionally the Time To Live (TTL) of a DNS resource record has
   been understood to represent the maximum number of seconds that a
   record can be used before it must be discarded, based on its
   description and usage in [RFC1035] and clarifications in [RFC2181].

   This document proposes that the definition of the TTL be explicitly
   expanded to allow for expired data to be used in the exceptional
   circumstance that a recursive resolver is unable to refresh the
   information.  It is predicated on the observation that authoritative

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   server unavailability can cause outages even when the underlying data
   those servers would return is typically unchanged.

   We describe a method below for this use of stale data, balancing the
   competing needs of resiliency and freshness.

2.  Terminology

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
   14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

   For a comprehensive treatment of DNS terms, please see [RFC7719].

3.  Background

   There are a number of reasons why an authoritative server may become
   unreachable, including Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, network
   issues, and so on.  If the recursive server is unable to contact the
   authoritative servers for a query but still has relevant data that
   has aged past its TTL, that information can still be useful for
   generating an answer under the metaphorical assumption that "stale
   bread is better than no bread."

   [RFC1035] Section 3.2.1 says that the TTL "specifies the time
   interval that the resource record may be cached before the source of
   the information should again be consulted", and Section 4.1.3 further
   says the TTL, "specifies the time interval (in seconds) that the
   resource record may be cached before it should be discarded."

   A natural English interpretation of these remarks would seem to be
   clear enough that records past their TTL expiration must not be used.
   However, [RFC1035] predates the more rigorous terminology of
   [RFC2119] which softened the interpretation of "may" and "should".

   [RFC2181] aimed to provide "the precise definition of the Time to
   Live", but in Section 8 was mostly concerned with the numeric range
   of values and the possibility that very large values should be
   capped.  (It also has the curious suggestion that a value in the
   range 2147483648 to 4294967295 should be treated as zero.)  It closes
   that section by noting, "The TTL specifies a maximum time to live,
   not a mandatory time to live."  This is again not [RFC2119]-normative
   language, but does convey the natural language connotation that data
   becomes unusable past TTL expiry.

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   Several major recursive resolver operators currently use stale data
   for answers in some way, including Akamai (in three different
   resolver implementations), BIND, Knot, OpenDNS, and Unbound.  Apple
   can also use stale data as part of the Happy Eyeballs algorithms in
   mDNSResponder.  The collective operational experience is that it
   provides significant benefit with minimal downside.

4.  Standards Action

   The definition of TTL in [RFC1035] Sections 3.2.1 and 4.1.3 is
   amended to read:

   TTL  a 32-bit unsigned integer number of seconds that specifies the
      duration that the resource record MAY be cached before the source
      of the information MUST again be consulted.  Zero values are
      interpreted to mean that the RR can only be used for the
      transaction in progress, and should not be cached.  Values SHOULD
      be capped on the orders of days to weeks, with a recommended cap
      of 604,800 seconds.  If the authority for the data is unavailable
      when attempting to refresh, the record MAY be used as though it is
      unexpired.

   Interpreting values which have the high order bit set as being
   positive, rather than 0, is a change from [RFC2181].  Suggesting a
   cap of seven days, rather than the 68 years allowed by [RFC2181],
   reflects the current practice of major modern DNS resolvers.

5.  Example Method

   There is conceivably more than one way a recursive resolver could
   responsibly implement this resiliency feature while still respecting
   the intent of the TTL as a signal for when data is to be refreshed.

   In this example method four notable timers drive considerations for
   the use of stale data, as follows:

   o  A client response timer, which is the maximum amount of time a
      recursive resolver should allow between the receipt of a
      resolution request and sending its response.

   o  A query resolution timer, which caps the total amount of time a
      recursive resolver spends processing the query.

   o  A resolution recheck timer, which limits the frequency at which a
      failed lookup will be attempted.

   o  A maximum stale timer, which caps the amount of time that records
      will be kept past their expiration.

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   Most recursive resolvers already have the query resolution timer, and
   effectively some kind of resolution recheck timer.  The client
   response timer and maximum stale timer are new concepts for this
   mechanism.

   When a request is received by the recursive resolver, it SHOULD start
   the client response timer.  This timer is used to avoid client
   timeouts.  It SHOULD be configurable, with a recommended value of 1.8
   seconds as being just under a common timeout value of 2 seconds while
   still giving the resolver a fair shot at resolving the name.

   The resolver then checks its cache for any unexpired data that
   satisfies the request and of course returns them if available.  If it
   finds no relevant unexpired data and the Recursion Desired flag is
   not set in the request, it SHOULD immediately return the response
   without consulting the cache for expired records.

   If iterative lookups will be, done then the resolution recheck timer
   is consulted.  Attempts to refresh from the authorities are
   recommended to be done no more frequently than every 30 seconds.  If
   this request was received within this period, the cache may be
   immediately consulted for stale data to satisfy the request.

   Outside the period of the resolution recheck timer, the resolver
   SHOULD start the query resolution timer and begin the iterative
   resolution process.  This timer bounds the work done by the resolver
   when contacting external authorities, and is commonly around 10 to 30
   seconds.

   If the answer has not been completely determined by the time the
   client response timer has elapsed, the resolver SHOULD then check its
   cache to see whether there is expired data that would satisfy the
   request.  If so, it adds that data to the response message; it MUST
   set the TTL of each expired record in the message greater than 0,
   with 30 seconds recommended.  The response is then sent to the client
   while the resolver continues its attempt to refresh the data.

   When no authorities are able to be reached during a resolution
   attempt, the resolver SHOULD attempt to refresh the delegation.

   Outside the resolution process, the maximum stale timer is used for
   cache management and is independent of the query resolution process.
   This timer is conceptually different from the maximum cache TTL that
   exists in many resolvers, the latter being a clamp on the value of
   TTLs as received from authoritative servers and recommended to be 7
   days in the TTL definition above.  The maximum stale timer SHOULD be
   configurable, and defines the length of time after a record expires
   that it SHOULD be retained in the cache.  The suggested value is 7

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   days, which gives time for monitoring to notice the resolution
   problem and for human intervention to fix it.

6.  Implementation Caveats

   Answers from authoritative servers that have a DNS Response Code of
   either 0 (NOERROR) or 3 (NXDOMAIN) MUST be considered to have
   refreshed the data at the resolver.  In particular, this means that
   this method is not meant to protect against operator error at the
   authoritative server that turns a name that is intended to be valid
   into one that is non-existent, because there is no way for a resolver
   to know intent.

   Stale data is used only when refreshing has failed, in order to
   adhere to the original intent of the design of the DNS and the
   behaviour expected by operators.  If stale data were to always be
   used immediately and then a cache refresh attempted after the client
   response has been sent, the resolver would frequently be sending data
   that it would have had no trouble refreshing.  As modern resolvers
   use techniques like pre-fetching and request coalescing for
   efficiency, it is not necessary that every client request needs to
   trigger a new lookup flow in the presence of stale data, but rather
   that a good-faith effort has been recently made to refresh the stale
   data before it is delivered to any client.  The recommended period
   between attempting refreshes is 30 seconds.

   It is important to continue the resolution attempt after the stale
   response has been sent, until the query resolution timeout, because
   some pathological resolutions can take many seconds to succeed as
   they cope with unavailable servers, bad networks, and other problems.
   Stopping the resolution attempt when the response with expired data
   has been sent would mean that answers in these pathological cases
   would never be refreshed.

   Canonical Name (CNAME) records mingled in the expired cache with
   other records at the same owner name can cause surprising results.
   This was observed with an initial implementation in BIND when a
   hostname changed from having an IPv4 Address (A) record to a CNAME.
   The version of BIND being used did not evict other types in the cache
   when a CNAME was received, which in normal operations is not a
   significant issue.  However, after both records expired and the
   authorities became unavailable, the fallback to stale answers
   returned the older A instead of the newer CNAME.

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6.1.  Implementation Considerations

   This document mainly describes the issues behind serving stale data
   and intentionally does not provide a formal algorithm.  The concept
   is not overly complex, and the details are best left to resolver
   authors to implement in their codebases.  The processing of serve-
   stale is a local operation, and consistent variables between
   deployments are not needed for interoperability.  However, we would
   like to highlight the impact of various variables.

   The most obvious of these is the maximum stale timer.  If this
   variable is too large it could cause excessive cache memory usage,
   but if it is too small, the serve-stale technique becomes less
   effective, as the record may not be in the cache to be used if
   needed.  Memory consumption could be mitigated by prioritizing
   removal of stale records over non-expired records during cache
   exhaustion.  Implementations may also wish to consider whether to
   track the names in requests for their last time of use or their
   popularity, using that as an additional factor when considering cache
   eviction.  A feature to manually flush only stale records could also
   be useful.

   The client response timer is another variable which deserves
   consideration.  If this value is too short, there exists the risk
   that stale answers may be used even when the authoritative server is
   actually reachable but slow; this may result in sub-optimal answers
   being returned.  Conversely, waiting too long will negatively impact
   user experience.

   The balance for the resolution recheck timer is responsiveness in
   detecting the renewed availability of authorities versus the extra
   resource use of resolution.  If this variable is set too large, stale
   answers may continue to be returned even after the authoritative
   server is reachable.  If this variable is too small, authoritative
   servers may be rapidly hit with a significant amount of traffic when
   they become reachable again.

   Regarding the TTL to set on stale records in the response,
   historically TTLs of zero seconds have been problematic for some
   implementations, and negative values can't effectively be
   communicated to existing software.  Other very short TTLs could lead
   to congestive collapse as TTL-respecting clients rapidly try to
   refresh.  The recommended 30 seconds not only sidesteps those
   potential problems with no practical negative consequences, it also
   rate limits further queries from any client that honors the TTL, such
   as a forwarding resolver.

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   Apart from timers, one more implementation consideration is the use
   of stale nameserver addresses for lookups.  This is mentioned
   explicitly because, in some resolvers, getting the addresses for
   nameservers is a separate path from a normal cache lookup.  If
   authoritative server addresses are not able to be refreshed,
   resolution can possibly still be successful if the authoritative
   servers themselves are up.  For instance, consider an attack on a
   toplevel domain that takes its nameservers offline; serve-stale
   resolvers that had expired glue addresses for subdomains within that
   TLD would still be able to resolve names within those subdomains,
   even those it had not previously looked up.

7.  Implementation Status

   [RFC Editor: per RFC 6982 this section should be removed prior to
   publication.]

   The algorithm described in the Section 5 section was originally
   implemented as a patch to BIND 9.7.0.  It has been in production on
   Akamai's production network since 2011, and effectively smoothed over
   transient failures and longer outages that would have resulted in
   major incidents.  The patch was contributed to Internet Systems
   Consortium and the functionality is now available in BIND 9.12 via
   the options stale-answer-enable, stale-answer-ttl, and max-stale-ttl.

   Unbound has a similar feature for serving stale answers, but will
   respond with stale data immediately if it has recently tried and
   failed to refresh the answer by pre-fetching.

   Knot Resolver has a demo module here: https://knot-
   resolver.readthedocs.io/en/stable/modules.html#serve-stale

   Details of Apple's implementation are not currently known.

   In the research paper "When the Dike Breaks: Dissecting DNS Defenses
   During DDoS" [DikeBreaks], the authors detected some use of stale
   answers by resolvers when authorities came under attack.  Their
   research results suggest that more widespread adoption of the
   technique would significantly improve resiliency for the large number
   of requests that fail or experience abnormally long resolution times
   during an attack.

8.  EDNS Option

   During the discussion of serve-stale in the IETF dnsop working group,
   it was suggested that an EDNS option should be available to either
   explicitly opt-in to getting data that is possibly stale, or at least

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   as a debugging tool to indicate when stale data has been used for a
   response.

   The opt-in use case was rejected as the technique was meant to be
   immediately useful in improving DNS resiliency for all clients.

   The reporting case was ultimately also rejected as working group
   participants determined that even the simpler version of a proposed
   option was still too much bother to implement for too little
   perceived value.

9.  Security Considerations

   The most obvious security issue is the increased likelihood of DNSSEC
   validation failures when using stale data because signatures could be
   returned outside their validity period.  This would only be an issue
   if the authoritative servers are unreachable, the only time the
   techniques in this document are used, and thus does not introduce a
   new failure in place of what would have otherwise been success.

   Additionally, bad actors have been known to use DNS caches to keep
   records alive even after their authorities have gone away.  This
   potentially makes that easier, although without introducing a new
   risk.

   In [CloudStrife] it was demonstrated how stale DNS data, namely
   hostnames pointing to addresses that are no longer in use by the
   owner of the name, can be used to co-opt security such as to get
   domain-validated certificates fraudulently issued to an attacker.
   While this RFC does not create a new vulnerability in this area, it
   does potentially enlarge the window in which such an attack could be
   made.  An obvious mitigation is that not only should a certificate
   authority not use a resolver that has this feature enabled, it should
   probably not use a caching resolver at all and instead fully look up
   each name freshly from the root.

10.  Privacy Considerations

   This document does not add any practical new privacy issues.

11.  NAT Considerations

   The method described here is not affected by the use of NAT devices.

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12.  IANA Considerations

   There are no IANA considerations.

13.  Acknowledgements

   The authors wish to thank Robert Edmonds, Tony Finch, Bob Harold,
   Matti Klock, Jason Moreau, Giovane Moura, Jean Roy, Mukund Sivaraman,
   Davey Song, Paul Vixie, Ralf Weber and Paul Wouters for their review
   and feedback.

14.  References

14.1.  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>.

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC2181]  Elz, R. and R. Bush, "Clarifications to the DNS
              Specification", RFC 2181, DOI 10.17487/RFC2181, July 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2181>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

14.2.  Informative References

   [CloudStrife]
              Borgolte, K., Fiebig, T., Hao, S., Kruegel, C., and G.
              Vigna, "Cloud Strife: Mitigating the Security Risks of
              Domain-Validated Certificates", ACM 2018 Applied
              Networking Research Workshop, DOI 10.1145/3232755.3232859,
              July 2018, <https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-
              content/uploads/2018/02/
              ndss2018_06A-4_Borgolte_paper.pdf>.

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   [DikeBreaks]
              Moura, G., Heidemann, J., Mueller, M., Schmidt, R., and M.
              Davids, "When the Dike Breaks: Dissecting DNS Defenses
              During DDos", ACM 2018 Internet Measurement Conference,
              DOI 10.1145/3278532.3278534, October 2018,
              <https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Moura18b.pdf>.

   [RFC7719]  Hoffman, P., Sullivan, A., and K. Fujiwara, "DNS
              Terminology", RFC 7719, DOI 10.17487/RFC7719, December
              2015, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7719>.

Authors' Addresses

   David C Lawrence
   Oracle

   Email: tale@dd.org

   Warren "Ace" Kumari
   Google
   1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
   Mountain View  CA 94043
   USA

   Email: warren@kumari.net

   Puneet Sood
   Google

   Email: puneets@google.com

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