Trusted upstream resolver

W.C.A. Wijngaards wouter at nlnetlabs.nl
Wed Nov 4 07:14:38 UTC 2015


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Hi Dave,

On 11/03/2015 10:04 PM, Dave Warren via Unbound-users wrote:
> On 2015-11-03 05:57, W.C.A. Wijngaards via Unbound-users wrote:
>> No, there is no option to disable the CNAME checks.  The trust in
>> the other nameserver is by the way not enough reason to have used
>> such an option, it is protection against inserted spoofed packets
>> here that has mandated the checks.
> 
> I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this one, why are
> CNAMEs different in regards to spoofing?

Because of the spoof from Kaminsky; the CNAME can be abused.
Basically, it uses the indirection of the CNAME to poison a different
target than the one queried for and that enables a birthday-paradox
exploit.

I do not know how else to fix this, except worry that the future holds
even more latency; for EDNS-option negotiation, for TCP and encryption
handshakes...  You could forward the domain names that are troubling
to a secondary cache, with a very large cache-min-ttl (and prefetch),
so that they are resolved from cache, but that sounds hacky.

Best regards, Wouter

> 
> I understand why the resolver wants to do sanity-checking, but are
> these records more vulnerable to spoofing than in the general case
> of trusting an upstream resolver implicitly?
> 
>> Consider enabling prefetch: yes   (and prefetch-key: yes) in 
>> unbound.conf, for commonly asked queries that will make it
>> prefetch a couple seconds before expiry to refresh the cache
>> entry, and that should be enough to hide this latency for a
>> larger number of queries.
> 
> When I was in a similar situation a few months back, prefetching
> made a *big* difference. However, only for names that are accessed
> by multiple clients. There were cases where one client was
> frequently accessing the same resource (but no others) and these
> still expired without getting prefetched due to the client side
> caching.
> 
> Such is life.
> 
>> Another option, but less desirable, is cache-min-ttl where you
>> can force entries to stay in the cache for a longer time (i.e.
>> that CNAME was from a CDN with very short TTLs).
> 
> Within a very reasonable ceiling. Perhaps 300 seconds might be the 
> largest cache-min-TTL that one might consider.
> 

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