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.