[dns-operations] Reporting glue as authoritive data -- Bug!

[Joe Abley]

On 31-Jan-2008, at 11:02, Edward Lewis wrote:

> I don't follow this at all, but I encourage that you take this from
> the mailing list and put it into a reviewed, archived, and
> distributed document such as an RFC.
>
> Are you saying that I could register "lurekiddies.example" with
> "www.childporn.com" as a name server, resulting in my issuing answers
> that have the address for www.childporn.com in the answer section?
> Or that it would convince COM to have the glue?

I think I understand what Paul is speculating about, but I have a  
couple of doubts as to whether it would work. Suppose, for example,  
the idea is:

1. Register childporn.com

2. Register a www.childporn.com host record (with an address, since  
it's subordinate to a com domain)

3. Register one or more other non-offensive domains with www.childporn.com 
  as a nameserver. Possibly these domains would need to be named  
under .com or .net (don't know; haven't tried)

4. Allow childporn.com to lapse (i.e. don't renew it -- let it expire)

I can see how it might appear that this would cause childporn.com to  
disappear as a domain, while the host record would persist for ever  
with no published contacts and no clear way to remove it. However, I'm  
not sure that's the case, since:

(a) host records have contact data associated with them

(b) in the example above, childporn.com would not actually expire  
(since the host record dependency exists) -- the sponsoring registrar  
would continue to be billed for it, and from the point of view of the  
registry it would still be a legitimate, registered domain.

Perhaps someone should try this general approach and see what happens.

I've had this kind of idea explained to me in the context of some evil- 
doer trying to game a registry into incurring registry fees for large  
numbers of domains without a corresponding revenue stream from  
registrants, which it seems to me would probably work. But I'm not  
sure that it's a mechanism to insert zombie A records into a TLD.


Joe