[krbdev.mit.edu #8809] [Comment] Do not call getaddrinfo() with invalid hostnames

"Greg Hudson via RT" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.encryption.kerberos.bugs
Message-ID <[email protected]>
https://krbdev.mit.edu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=8809
This is a comment.  It is not sent to the Requestor(s):

Jeff encountered a mail delivery issue updating the ticket; here is his
response:

RFC 2743 Section 4.1 states that the second component will be treated as
a hostname regardless of whether or not a DNS lookup succeeds.

   "When a reference to a name of this type is resolved, the 'hostname'
   may (as an example implementation strategy) be canonicalized by
   attempting a DNS lookup and using the fully-qualified domain name
   which is returned, or by using the 'hostname' as provided if the DNS
   lookup fails.  The canonicalization operation also maps the host's
   name into lower-case characters."

In the case of a name which begins with a leading underscore the DNS
lookup is guaranteed to fail.  I will call out two items in the above a
paragraph:

 1. Canonicalization by attempting a DNS lookup is optional.

 2. If the optional DNS lookup fails, the 'hostname' will be used
    as provided.

What I have pointed out in this ticket is that a getaddrinfo() query
will always fail for a name beginning with a leading underscore and that
the failure might take a long time.  Therefore, there is no benefit to
issuing the query and the canonicalization step described in Section 4.1
should be skipped.
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.