unbound trust-anchor

[Chris Gordon]

> On Oct 8, 2017, at 8:08 PM, Ernie Luzar <luzar722 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If I comprehend the unbound-anchor man page correctly, at unbound start time a trust-anchor is fetched from a unbound website. This is required for dnssec. Is this really necessary. I do not like any software application to be dialing home. Way to easy for that website to become compromised and bad things happen to my host.

This function is to get the trust anchors for DNSsec validation.  If you don’t want to use DNSsec, then you don’t need them.  If you’re going to disable this then be sure you do NOT have DNSsec validation enabled in your configuration.

For those that want to do DNSsec validation, this automatic anchor retrieval is very nice.  In fact ICANN just announced delaying rolling over the root zone KSKs since there were too many resolvers that had not updated their trust anchors and they didn’t want all of those DNS resolvers to suddenly stop working.

The default site where the file is pulled is data.inana.org.  This is not a site associated with unbound but with IANA.  I understand and agree with your desire to minimize where your machine(s) pull data, but for me having working DNSsec validation out weights the risks of getting a “compromised” trust anchor.  Note that if you have a compromised/corrupt trust anchor, DNSsec validation will fail and DNS wouldn’t work for you.  Though DNS not working would be a very “bad” thing, it would be quick to diagnose and fix.

> Can unbound function without this dial home feature?
> How would I go about disabling it.

Take a look at /usr/local/etc/rc.d/unbound.  You could just modify this and then make sure you don’t have validation enabled in unbound.conf.

Chris