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Re: [ietf-dkim] New Issue: Use of XPTR records in SSP

2007-04-17 00:13:36
On Monday 16 April 2007 20:34, Jim Fenton wrote:
This is the first of a few issues that come in trying to rationalize at
least two of the SSP proposals, draft-hallambaker-dkimpolicy-00 and
draft-allman-dkim-ssp.  I'd like to keep the issues separate, because I
think they're largely independent, so please respond in kind if at all
possible.

=====

Phill Hallam-Baker has proposed the publication of a new PTR-like  RR
type, tentatively called XPTR, in order to improve the scalability of
the SSP mechanism to a large number (~1000?) of additional types of
policy in the future.  To look up the signing policy of example.com, the
sequence would be:

1.    Query for XPTR record for example.com.  If result is an NXDOMAIN
error, the domain does not exist.  If result is a NODATA error, either
the policy or the domain does not exist.
2.    Query for [RRtype TBD; separate issue] record for
_dkimpolicy.{result of XPTR query}; policy record is stored at that
location.

Argument Pro:  Supports a potentially very large number of policies, as
might be needed for WS-* (for example) in the future.  Permits a central
point of control and modification for policies relating to different
classes of nodes in the domain.

Argument Con: Requires an additional lookup per query; other types of
policy are out of scope for the WG.

Additional arguement Con is that a new RR type takes a LONG time to deploy.  
In 2 - 5 years when this new RR type is deployed, whatever problem it was 
trying to solve will likely be solved some other way.

Scott K
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