Subject: DNSSECbis specification glitch (type/class order reversed in signatures)

From: Rob Austein <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 16:52:00 -0500

Just a notification from your friendly neighborhood DNSSECbis document
editors, to avoid suprising anyone.

Miek Gieben and Jelte Jansen pointed out what we are certain is an
editorial goof in way we specified calculation of the RRSIG signature
value.  The current drafts (both -protocol and -records) say that the
signature is calculated over

  RR(i) = name | class | type | OrigTTL | RDATA length | RDATA

As Miek and Jelte pointed out to us, the class and type fields here
are reversed from the normal RFC 1035 ordering for a wire-encoded RR
(not to be confused with the RFC 1035 text format, which has the class,
type, and TTL fields in reverse order to avoid parse ambiguities).

To the best of our knowledge:

a) RFC 2535 did not explictly specify the order, but the algorithm has
   generally been understood as signing the wire representation;

b) There has been no WG action since RFC 2535 that would change this;
   and

c) All current implementations of which we're aware use the wire
   ordering, not what the DNSSECbis specs currently say.

So this seems to have just been an editorial goof, we've fixed it in
the editors' working sources, and the fix will be in the next
revisions of the drafts we post.

If anyone has a problem with this change, please send mail to the
editors, the WG chairs, or to namedroppers, as appropriate.

Thanks to Miek and Jelte for catching this!

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From: "Olaf M. Kolkman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 09:36:19 +0100

Miek, Jelte, Good Catch!! 

>     generally been understood as signing the wire representation;

It is somewhat hidden through a refference from section 4.1.8
(Signature field):

 " RR(s) is the RRset of the RR(s)(...) in canonical form and order as
 defined in Section 8. "

RFC 2535 section 8.1 applies:

 For purposes of DNSsecurity, the canonical form for an RR is the wire
 format of the RR (...)

-- Olaf

---------------------------------| Olaf M. Kolkman
---------------------------------| RIPE NCC

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From: "Olaf M. Kolkman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 09:36:19 +0100

-- Olaf

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From: "Olaf M. Kolkman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 09:36:19 +0100

-- Olaf