Skip to main content
Resources

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.

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."