Skip to main content
Resources

Country Code Top Level Domains in DAAR

As part of an effort to expand the effectiveness of Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR) for the ICANN community, in November 2019, country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) were invited to participate in the DAAR system designed by ICANN's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO).

In order to participate, ccTLD managers were asked to voluntarily provide their zone files to the DAAR system. These zone files would only be used in the DAAR system and would not be used or shared for any other purpose or be placed into ICANN's Centralized Zone Data Service (CZDS). Every ccTLD that joins the project would be able to receive DAAR data on a daily basis via ICANN's Monitoring System API (MoSAPI).

In addition, OCTO provides customized monthly reports to the participating ccTLDs. These reports contain analytics specifically based on the data submitted by each ccTLD, and the data is only shared with the respective ccTLD manager. In each report, ccTLD-related statistics are shown with all the other ccTLDs and generic TLDs (gTLDs) being anonymized. These personalized reports aim to help ccTLDs understand where they stand in terms of the security threat data listed by providers of Reputation Block Lists (RBLs) in comparison to other TLDs. These documents are in addition to the existing DAAR monthly reports and daily security threat scores.

To date, 22 ccTLDs have joined this effort:

  1. .au
  2. .se
  3. .tw
  4. .cl
  5. .nu
  6. .ee
  7. .tz
  8. .gt
  9. .sv
  10. .mw
  11. .gg
  12. .je
  13. .ch
  14. .ke
  15. .in
  16. .ca
  17. .li
  18. .co
  19. .fo
  20. .fr
  21. .pt
  22. .pl

We thank the managers of these ccTLDs for voluntarily participating in the DAAR project and their efforts to stem domain name abuse.

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."