nanog mailing list archives

Re: Question re prevention of enumeration with DNSSEC (NSEC3, etc.)


From: Masataka Ohta <mohta () necom830 hpcl titech ac jp>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2022 19:16:24 +0900

John McCormac wrote:

There are various ways, such as crawling the web, to enumerate
domain names.

That is not an efficient method.

Not a problem for large companies or botnet. So, only
small legal players suffer from hiding zone information.

For example, large companies such as google can obtain enumerated
list of all the current most active domains in the world, which
can, then, be used to access whois.

What Google might obtain would be a list of domain names with websites. The problem is that the web usage rate for TLDs varies with some ccTLDs seeing a web usage rate of over 40% (40% of domain names having developed websites) but some of the new gTLDs have web usage rates below 10%. Some of the ccTLDs have high web usage rates.

You misunderstand my statement. Domain names not offering
HTTP service can also be collected by web crawling.

Hiding DNS zone information from public is beneficial to powerful
entities such as google.

In some respects, yes.

Google can also use gmail to collect domain names used by
sent or received e-mails.

But there is a problem with that because of all the FUD about websites linking to "bad" websites that had been pushed in the media a few years ago.

Is your concern privacy of "bad" websites?

Another factor that is often missed is the renewal rate of domain names.

That's not a problem related to enumeration of domain names.

A lot of personal data such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers and even postal addresses have been removed from gTLD records because of the fear of GDPR.

As I have been saying, the problem, *if+ *any*, is whois. So?

The zones change. New domain names are registered and domain names are deleted. For many TLDs, the old WHOIS model of registrant name, e-mail and phone number no longer exists. And there are also WHOIS privacy services which have obscured ownership.

As I wrote:

: Moreover, because making ownership information of lands and
: domain names publicly available promotes public well fair
: and domain name owners approve publication of such
: information in advance, there shouldn't be any concern
: of privacy breach forbidden by local law of DE.

that is not a healthy movement.

                                                Masataka Ohta


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