Root Server Operator Procedures for Emergency Revocation of Evaluation-Purpose IDN TLDs
Background
The IANA process for inserting and managing IDN TLD delegations in the DNS root zone for evaluation purposes was approved by the ICANN Board in June 2007. That process contains an Emergency Revocation Procedure which will be invoked if certain fault conditions take place. This document describes the process that invokes the emergency procedure, and has been developed based upon the recommendations ICANN's Root Server System Advisory Committee made at its 22 July 2007 meeting.
The process is designed to ensure that if any critical stability issues are caused by the existence of (evaluation purpose) IDN delegations in the DNS root zone, that these issues are identified and the delegations are removed in accordance with the IANA Procedure.
Procedures
The root-server operators are asked to participate voluntarily by monitoring traffic during the evaluation periods. The traffic monitoring is anticipated to inform the root-server operators of critical stability issues, and allow them to request the corresponding delegations be removed if they cause concern. As per IANA's processes, such activity will be followed with a public review. If the cause of the issue is determined to be not related to the delegation, then the delegation will be reinstituted.
Root-server operators are asked to sign up for participation prior to the launch of the evaluations. While the level of participation can be decided individually by each root-server operator, the anticipated monitoring includes:
- The number of queries for records related to each of the evaluation zones.
- The queries can be measured as average queries per second and queries for the previous 24 hours.
- The average load relating to the evaluation zones measured as a percentage of overall traffic.
- Relating to both query-load (such as queries per second) and bandwidth utilization (such as bytes per second)
Participating root-server operators will also be asked to create a baseline profile of queries prior to the insertion of the evaluation delegations. This data will be used for comparison purposes.
The tolerance for introduction of errors or damage to the provisioning of the root zone caused by introduction of evaluation purpose delegations is zero. Any delegation that is inserted, modified or removed in the root zone should have no negative effect on the availability of the zone as a whole or the resolution of other delegations within that zone.
Root-server operators will be able to communicate to IANA on an expedited basis using a 24x7 emergency call centre service, in order to start the Emergency Revocation Procedure as quickly as possible.