Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC)

The SSAC is a volunteer group of specialists in the technical security field that provides advice and insight to the ICANN community and the Board.

SAC033 | Executive Summary for Domain Name Registration Information and Directory Services

[PDF, 186 KB]

This paper is a companion document to SAC 027 Comment to GNSO regarding WHOIS studies http://www.icann.org/committees/security/sac027.pdf

The paper asserts that the WHOIS protocol and variability among WHOIS implementations contribute to the poor quality of domain name registration data currently available. The paper further asserts that the ICANN community would be served well if the accuracy and availability of domain registration information were improved.

The paper describes features and characteristics that are common to many proprietary and public directory service applications (a common data schema and authentication, authorization, auditing, accuracy and availability frameworks), and suggests a set of questions that the ICANN community could use as the basis for formulating a requirements statement for an Internet Directory Service.

This paper is informational and makes no specific recommendations. SSAC suggests that this informational paper could serve as the basis for discussions related to future WHOIS features and services.