IETF Individual Submission Bill Manning draft-manning-opcode-discover-01.txt ep.net Paul Vixie ISC 02 Jun 2005 Supporting unicast replies to multicast queries in the DNS or DISCOVER opcode defined This document is an Internet-Draft and is subject to all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026 except that the right to produce derivative works is not granted. By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. 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." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on December 3, 2005. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract The QUERY opcode in the DNS is designed for unicast environments. With the development of multicast capabilities in the DNS, it is desirable to have a more robust opcode for server interactions since a single request may generate replies from multiple responders. So DISCOVER is defined to deal with replies from multiple responders. As such, this document documents experimental extensions the core DNS specifications that were made during the TBDS effort, to allow clients to have a method for coping with replies from multiple responders. Use of this new opcode may facilitate DNS operations in modern networking topologies. A prototype of the DISCOVER opcode was developed during the TBDS project (1999-2000), funded under DARPA grant F30602-99-1-0523. Introduction When exploring multicast as a viable means for DNS service discover as part of TBDS project (1999-2000), funded under DARPA grant F30602-99-1-0523, it became apparent that the original DNS op-code, QUERY[5] was designed such that a single response was expected. In a multicast environment, it was possible that multiple replies were not only possible but to be expected. Instead of modifying the QUERY opcode, we have developed and tested a new opcode, here-in called DISCOVER, which is designed to accommodate multiple responses. The full processing rules used by TBDS are documented here for possible incorporation in a future revision of the DNS specification. This draft was originally submitted for consideration in 2q2000. Method: DISCOVER works like QUERY except: 1. it can be sent to a broadcast or multicast destination. QUERY isn't defined for non-unicast, and arguably shouldn't be. 2. the Question section, if present, has <QNAME=zonename,QTYPE=SOA> tuples. Within TBDS, we tried to augment this structure as follows: <QNAME=service,QTYPE=SRV>. While this worked for our purposes in the TBDS project, it is cleaner to place the SRV question in a separate pass and any future work should take this into consideration. 3. if QDCOUNT equals 0 then only servers willing to do recursion should answer. Other servers must silently discard the DISCOVER request. 4. if QDCOUNT is not equal to 0 then only servers who are authoritative for the zones named by some QNAME should answer. 5. responses may echo the request's Question section or leave it blank, just like QUERY. 6. responses have standard Answer, Authority, and Additional sections e.g. the response is the same as that to a QUERY. It is desirable that zero content answers not be sent to avoid badly formed or unfulfilled requests. Responses should be sent to the unicast address of the requester and the source address should reflect the unicast address of the responder. Example usage for gethostby{name,addr}-style requesters: Compute the zone name of the enclosing in-addr.arpa, ip6.int, or ip6.arpa domain. DISCOVER whether anyone in-scope is authoritative for this zone. If so, query these authoritative servers for local in-addr/ip6 names. If not, DISCOVER whether there are recursive servers available. If so, query these recursive servers for local in-addr/ip6 names. So, a node will issue a multicast request with the DISCOVER opcode at some particular multicast scope. Then determine, from the replies, whether there are any DNS servers which are authoritative (or support recursion) for the zone. Replies to DISCOVER requests MUST set the Recursion Available (RA) flag in the DNS message header. It is important to recognize that a requester must be prepared to receive multiple replies from multiple responders. We expect that there will be a single response per responder. Once one learns a host's FQDN by the above means, repeat the process for discovering the closest enclosing authoritative server of such local name. Cache all NS and A data learned in this process, respecting TTL's. The TBDS project usage for SRV requesters is described in the section below. The sequence of steps describes the basic algorithm used by TBDS code to request and process multiple replies within an IP multicast domain. Do the gethostbyaddr() and gethostbyname() on one's own link-local address, using the above process. Assume that the closest enclosing zone for which an authority server answers an in-scope DISCOVER packet is "this host's parent domain". Compute the SRV name as _service._transport.*.parentdomain. This is a change to the definition as defined in RFC 1034. A wildcard label ("*") in the QNAME used in a DNS message with op-code DISCOVER should be evaluated with special rules. The wildcard matches any label for which the DNS server data is authoritative. For example 'x.*.example.com.' would match 'x.y.example.com.' and 'x.yy.example.com.' provided that the server was authoritative for 'example.com.' In this particular case, we suggest the following considerations be made: getservbyname() can be satisfied by issuing a request with this computed SRV name. This structure can be populated by values returned from a request as follows: s_name The name of the service, "_service" without the preceding underscore. s_aliases The names returned in the SRV RRs in replies to the query. s_port The port number in the SRV RRs replies to the query. If these port numbers disagree - one of the port numbers is chosen, and only those names which correspond are returned. s_proto The transport protocol from named by the "_transport" label, without the preceding underscore. We then send SRV query for this name to discovered local authoritative servers. DISCOVER usage for disconnected networks with no authoritative servers can be extrapolated with the following conditions being met: Hosts should run a "stub server" which acts as though its FQDN is a zone name. Computed SOA gives the host's FQDN as MNAME, "." as the ANAME, seconds-since-1Jan2000 as the SERIAL, low constants for EXPIRE and the other SOA timers. Compute NS as the host's FQDN. Compute the glue as the host's link-local address. Or Hosts may run a "DNS stub server" which acts as though its FQDN is a zone name. The rules governing the behavior of this stub server are given elsewhere [1] [2]. Such stub servers should answer DISCOVER packets for its zone, and will be found by the iterative "discover closest enclosing authority server" by DISCOVER clients, either in the gethostbyname() or SRV cases described above. Note that stub servers only answer with zone names which exactly match QNAME's, not with zone names which are owned by QNAME's. The main deviation from the DNS[3][4] model is that a host (like, say, a printer offering LPD services) has a DNS server which answers authoritatively for something which hasn't been delegated to it. However, the only way that such DNS servers can be discovered is with a new opcode, DISCOVER, which is explicitly defined to discover undelegated zones for tightly scoped purposes. Therefore this isn't officially a violation of DNS's coherency principles. In some cases a responder to DISCOVER may not be traditional DNS software, it could be special purpose software. IANA Considerations As a new opcode, the IANA will need to assign a numeric value for the memnonic. The last OPCODE assigned was "5", for UPDATE. Test implementations have used OPCODE "6". Op-codes 0 - 2 were defined in RFC 1035, section 4.1.1, op-code 3 is listed as IANA reserved, op-code 4 is defined in RFC 1996 and op-code 5 is defined in RFC 2136. op-code 1 has been retired with the publication of RFC 3425. Security Considerations No new security considerations are known to be introduced with any new op-code, however using multicast for service discovery has the potential for denial of service, primarily from flooding attacks. It may also be possible to enable deliberate misconfiguration of clients simply by running a malicious DNS server that claims to be authoritative for delegations that it is not. One possible way to mitigate this effect is by use of credentials, such as CERT resource records within an RR set. The TBDS project took this approach. TBDS did not directly utilize DNSSEC and so not known interactions with DNSSEC aware/capable servers is known. Attribution This material was generated in discussions on the mdns mailing list hosted by Zocalo in March 2000. Updated by discussion in September/October 2003 on a closed mailing list. David Lawrence, Scott Rose, Stuart Cheshire, Bill Woodcock, Erik Guttman were active contributors. Suzanne Woolf was part of the original implementation team and an invaluable sanity checker. References [1] Esibov, L., Aboba, B., Thaler, D., "Multicast DNS", draft-ietf-dnsext-mdns-00.txt, November 2000. Expired [2] Woodcock, B., Manning, B., "Multicast Domain Name Service", draft-manning-dnsext-mdns-00.txt, August 2000. Expired. [3] Mockapetris, P., "DOMAIN NAMES - CONCEPTS AND FACILITIES", RFC 1034, November 1987. [4] Mockapetris, P., "DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND SPECIFICATION", RFC 1035, November 1987 [5] QUERY - defined in section 3.7, 4.3, and section 5 of RFC 1034 and in section 4.1.1 of RFC 1035. Author's Address Bill Manning PO 12317 Marina del Rey, CA. 90295 Paul Vixie 950 Charter Street Redwood City, CA 94063 Intellectual Property Statement The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has made any independent effort to identify any such rights. Information on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be found in BCP 78 and BCP 79. 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