Moving DNSSEC Lookaside Validation (DLV) to Historic Status
draft-mekking-dnsop-obsolete-dlv-00

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DNS Operations                                                W. Mekking
Internet-Draft                                                D. Mahoney
Intended status: Informational                                       ISC
Expires: January 3, 2020                                    July 2, 2019

      Moving DNSSEC Lookaside Validation (DLV) to Historic Status
                  draft-mekking-dnsop-obsolete-dlv-00

Abstract

   This document obsoletes DNSSEC lookaside validation (DLV) and
   reclassifies RFCs 4431 and 5074 as Historic.

Status of This Memo

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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction
   2.  Discussion
   3.  Moving DLV to Historic Status
     3.1.  Documents that reference the DLV RFCs
       3.1.1.  Documents that reference RFC 4431
       3.1.2.  Documents that reference RFC 5074
   4.  IANA Considerations
   5.  Security considerations
   6.  Acknowledgements
   7.  Normative References
   Authors' Addresses

1.  Introduction

   DNSSEC Lookaside Validation (DLV) was introduced to assist with the
   adoption of DNSSEC [RFC4033] [RFC4034] [RFC4035] in a time where the
   root zone and many top level domains (TLDs) were unsigned, to help
   entities with signed zones under an unsigned parent zone, or that
   have registrars that don't accept DS records.  As of May 2019, the
   root zone is signed and 1389 out of 1531 TLDs have a secure
   delegation from the root; thus DLV has served its purpose and can now
   retire.

2.  Discussion

   One could argue that DLV is still useful because there are still some
   unsigned TLDs and entities under those zones will not benefit from
   signing their zone.  However, keeping the DLV mechanism also has
   disadvantages:

   o  It reduces the pressure to get the parent zone signed.

   o  It reduces the pressure on registrars to accept DS records.

   o  It complicates validation code.

   In addition, not every validator actually implements DLV (only BIND 9
   and Unbound) so even if an entity can use DLV to set up an alternate
   path to its trust anchor, its effect is limited.  Furthermore, there
   was one well-known DLV registry (dlv.isc.org) and that has been
   deprecated (replaced with a signed empty zone) on September 30, 2017.
   With the absence of a well-known DLV registry service it is unlikely
   that there is a real benefit for the protocol on the Internet
   nowadays.

   One other possible reason to keep DLV is to distribute trust anchors
   for private enterprises.  However it was never the intention for DLV
   to be used for this purpose, and DLV has some properties that do not
   entirely fit this use case:

   o  It would be more desirable if the trust anchors for internal zones
      have a higher priority than the public trust anchors, but DLV
      works as a fallback.

   o  Since the zones are related to private networks, it would make
      more sense to make the internal network more secure to avoid name
      redirection, rather than complicate the DNS protocol.

   Given these arguments, plus its fairly limited use case, and the
   above disadvantages to keep DLV, it is probably not worth the effort
   of maintaining the DLV mechanism.

3.  Moving DLV to Historic Status

   There are two RFCs that specify DLV:

   1.  RFC 4431 [RFC4431] specifies the DLV resource record.

   2.  RFC 5074 [RFC5074] specifies the DLV mechanism for publishing
       trust anchors outside the DNS delegation chain and how validators
       can use them to validate DNSSEC-signed data.

   This document moves both RFC 4431 [RFC4431] and RFC 5074 [RFC5074] to
   Historic status.  This is a clear signal to implementers that the DLV