On 24 Jun 2025, at 21:38, Ben Schwartz <[email protected]> wrote:

> 1. An attacker could strip the SVCB record and its RRSIG, resulting in an 
> ordinary delegation response that would be accepted and used without 
> encryption.

True. A client that didn't find a record could query for it which would give it 
the ability to validate any non-existence, but that sounds like a lot of 
pointless queries in the situation where the majority of zones don't have this 
kind of thing deployed (when most referrals don't include a courtesy SVCB).

> 2. This is a child-side record, and so presumably also a child-side RRSIG, 
> but the validator may not yet have the child's DNSKEYs.  Fetching those keys 
> (in order to validate the transport configuration) would create additional 
> delay before the query could be sent.

That additional delay can be amortised over the lifetime in the cache of those 
records needed to provide a chain of trust though. A validator is going to have 
to do that work at some point.  

> 3. The parent-side logic to serve this RRSIG, and the coordination channels 
> to get it there, seem complicated.

I guess. It seems approximately as complicated as CNAME flattening which is 
pretty common.

> Assuming it is signed by the ZSK, this also breaks a usual rule of not having 
> parent-side content depend on the child ZSK.

The referral can be processed without it (by using other transports) so I'm not 
sure it's a dependency. 

The downgrade attack seems worth thinking about. I'm not sure how much we need 
to care about the other things. 


Joe
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