DNS pollution

[Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>]

In the past month or so I've run across two separate ISPs that are 
apparently polluting the DNS by returning A records in cases where the 
authoritative server would either return NXDOMAIN or no answers.  The A 
records generally point to an HTTP server that will display 
advertisements, but I've also seen more sinister things happen.

Is there anything that IETF as an organization, or IETF participants, 
can do to discourage this?  To me this is fraud and unfair trade 
practice in addition to being a security threat (as people give their 
passwords when trying to connect to the wrong site) and harmful to 
applications (either because they do connect to a protocol engine on the 
wrong server, or they try to connect to a nonexistent protocol engine on 
the wrong server and treat the "connection refused" or "connection timed 
out" condition as a temporary error).  I've also seen this break 
applications that speak both IPv4 and IPv6 by failing to return the AAAA 
records.

I'm willing to write a draft explaining in detail why this is harmful, 
but somehow I think it will take more than just an RFC to get this 
practice stopped.

Keith


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