I found Thomas Ptacek's comments regarding DNSSEC deliciously ironic not for anything directly related to secure DNS, but rather a point he made in substantiating his position regarding DNSSEC while describing the intelligence (or lack thereof) of the network and application layers.
This may have just been oversight on his part, but it occurs to me that I've witnessed something on the order of a polar magnetic inversion of sorts. Or not. Maybe it's the coffee. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe does that to me.
Specifically, Thomas and I have debated previously about this topic and my contention is that the network plumbing ought to be fast, reliable, resilient and dumb whilst elements such as security and applications should make up a service layer of intelligence running atop the pipes.
Thomas' assertions focus on the manifest destiny that Cisco will rule the interconnected universe and that security, amongst other things, will -- and more importantly should -- become absorbed into and provided by the network switches and routers.
While Thomas' arguments below are admittedly regarding the "Internet" versus the "Intranet," I maintain that the issues are the same. It seems that his statements below which appear to endorse the "...end-to-end argument in system design" regarding the "...fundamental design principle of the Intenet" are at odds with his previous aspersions regarding my belief. Check out the bits in red.
Here's what Thomas said in "A Case Against DNSSSEC (A Matasano Miniseries):
...You know what? I don’t even agree in principle. DNSSEC is a bad thing, even if it does work.
How could that possibly be?
It violates a fundamental design principle of the Internet.
Nonsense. DNSSEC was designed and endorsed by several of the architects of the Internet. What principle would they be violating?
The end-to-end argument in system design. It says that you want to keep the Internet dumb and the applications smart. But DNSSEC does the opposite. It says, “Applications aren’t smart enough to provide security, and end-users pay the price. So we’re going to bake security into the infrastructure.”
I could have sworn that the bit in italics is exactly what Thomas used to say. Beautiful. If, Thomas truly agrees with this axiom and that indeed the Internet (the plumbing) is supposed to be dumb and applications (service layer) smart, then I suggest he should revisit his rants regarding how he believes the embedding security in the nework is a good idea since it invalidates the very "foundation" of the Internet.
I wonder what that'll do internal networks?
That's all. CSI is on.
/Hoff
(Written @ Home drinking Yirgacheffe watching UFC re-runs)