[dns-wg] final? draft of NTIA response

Jim &all,

Thank you for all the efforts you put in this work and congratulations
for the result.

It appears to me that the reservations I raised in Dubai about the
risk our text be interpreted as an endorsement of the current
process/actors have been well addressed in the recent versions.

Now, speaking individuall as a member of this working group, I support
this text as is* and I'm in favor of moving it forward at least as a
DNS-WG document (if we happened not to get a consensus at the RIPE
meeting level).

Mohsen.

* "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" as we say in French and further
  improvements which are of course possible would be too
  energy/time-consuming for editors and for the wg.

 On 07 Nov, Jim Reid wrote:
 | Colleagues, here is what I hope is the final draft of our response to  
 | the NTIA. I trust we can reach consensus on this. There is very little  
 | time to continue with update/review cycles, so I would appreciate if  
 | any comments were confined to showstoppers. We might have reservations  
 | or quibbles about some of the detail or phrasing. However unless these  
 | materially affect the response, could I ask you to please keep these  
 | to yourself? My worry here is that further tweaks lead to yet more  
 | comments and tweaks, and this goes on and on and on. The current  
 | langauge may not be perfect. However I hope it is something that we  
 | can all agree is good enough.
 | 
 | I would also ask WG members to say they support the text (assuming you  
 | do of course). It would be better to have positive statements of  
 | support instead of declaring that silence on this topic is consensus  
 | for the WG.
 | 
 | 
 | #
 | #	$Id: ntia-draft,v 1.7 2008/11/07 11:55:18 jim Exp $
 | #
 | 
 | The RIPE community (or DNS WG?) thanks the NTIA for its consultation
 | on proposals to sign the root and is pleased to offer the following
 | response to that consultation. We urge the adoption of a solution that
 | leads to the prompt introduction of a signed root zone. Our community
 | considers the introduction of a signed root zone to be an essential
 | enabling step towards widespread deployment of Secure DNS, DNSSEC.
 | 
 | It is to be expected that a community as diverse as RIPE cannot have a
 | unified set of detailed answers to the NTIA questionnaire. However  
 | several
 | members of the RIPE community will be individually responding to that
 | questionnaire. We present the following statement as the consensus
 | view of our community (or the DNS Working Group?) about the principles
 | that should form the basis of the introduction of a signed DNS root.
 | 
 | 1. Secure DNS, DNSSEC, is about data authenticity and integrity and
 | not about control.
 | 
 | 2. The introduction of DNSSEC to the root zone must be recognised as a
 | global initiative.
 | 
 | 3. Addition of DNSSEC to the root zone must be done in a way that does
 | not compromise the security and stability of the Domain Name System.
 | 
 | 4. When balancing the various concerns about signing the root zone,
 | the chosen approach must provide an appropriate level of trust and
 | confidence by offering a maximally secure technical solution.
 | 
 | 5. Deployment of a signed root should be done in a timely but not
 | hasty manner.
 | 
 | 6. To assist with a timely deployment, any procedural changes
 | introduced by DNSSEC should be aligned with the current process for
 | coordinating changes to and the distribution of the root zone. However
 | those procedural changes should provide sufficient flexibility to
 | allow for the roles and processes as well as the entities holding
 | those roles to be changed after suitable consultations have taken
 | place.
 | 
 | 7. Policies and processes for signing the root zone should make it
 | easy for TLDs to supply keys and credentials so the delegations for
 | those TLDs can benefit from a common DNSSEC trust anchor, the signed
 | root.
 | 
 | 8. There is no technical justification to create a new organisation to
 | oversee the process of signing of the root.
 | 
 | 9. No data should be moved between organisations without appropriate
 | authenticity and integrity checking.
 | 
 | 10. The public part of the key signing key must be distributed as
 | widely as possible.
 | 
 | 11. The organisation that generates the root zone file must sign the
 | file and therefore hold the private part of the zone signing key.
 | 
 | 12. Changes to the entities and roles in the signing process must not
 | necessarily require a change of keys.