ICANN Considers Using '127.0.53.53' To Tackle DNS Namespace Collisions

angry tapir writes "As the number of top-level domains undergoes explosive growth, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is studying ways to reduce the risk of traffic intended for internal network destinations ending up on the Internet via the Domain Name System. Proposals in a report produced on behalf of ICANN include preventing .mail, .home and .corp ever being Internet TLDs; allowing the forcible de-delegation of some second-level domains in emergencies; and returning 127.0.53.53 as an IP address in the hopes that sysadmins will flag and Google it."

Comments

Re:hacky

[DarkOx]

The problem really isn't so much not being able to reach some.home, on the internal network or even something.home on the Internet when you already have a local .home. zone.

The problem is all the uncounted config files out there with unqualified or partially qualified names in them. The RFCs are not entirely clear on what the correct behavior is, and worse the web browser folks have decided to implement the behavior differently themselves in some cases, rather than use the system nss services/apis.

So if you imagine an environment where DHCP configures a list of DNS search suffixes, and one of those is something like us.example.com or something. How the Windows boxes interpret a query mobile.mail (note no trailing dot) will possibly be different than the way the Linux machines do, and different than what the OS X machines do, etc and what Chrome or Firefox decide to do might be different than what nslookup does even on the same machine!

Its going to be nightmarish from a support and troubleshooting perspective, and lets face it nobody on your PC tech team really understands DNS, your network admins probably have a good handle but some major blind spots, and your developers are accustomed to making what are now dangerous assumptions. I am not sure I fully understand DNS on most days.

This is going to be a support nightmare at least at some sites, even some places where the ONLY sin was not using FQDNs everywhere all the time. Which might have deliberate, perhaps not the best way to have gone about it but knowing how search domains operate, and being able to set them with DHCP is entirely possible and like someone architect-ed mobile systems getting a local resource by depending on that behavior.

There are all kinds of potential security problems too. The gTLD expansion is making the Internet both less reliable and less safe.