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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.

SAC066 | Executive Summary for SSAC Comment Concerning JAS Phase One Report on Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions

[PDF, 305.44 KB]

This report provides SSAC comments related to a report ICANN published on 26 February 2014 titled “Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions: A Study on Namespace Collisions in the Global Internet DNS Namespace and a Framework for Risk Mitigation, Phase One Report,” prepared for ICANN by JAS Global Advisors (or “JAS Phase One Report”). The JAS Phase One Report outlines a risk assessment model, methods for identifying and managing DNS collisions, and recommendations for emergency responses in cases impacting critical systems related to human health or safety.

A DNS “name collision” refers to the mistaken interpretation of a domain name that causes a resolution conflict between the Domain Name System (DNS) and any privately defined namespace, such as between a generic top-level domain (gTLD) and a domain used in a private namespace used internally by companies.

In response to various recommendations laid out in the JAS Phase One Report, the SSAC issued its own comments and recommendations.

Recommendations

  • Recommendation 1: ICANN should expand the range of situations that would trigger an emergency response, for example national security, emergency preparedness, critical infrastructure, key economic processes, commerce, and the preservation of law and order.
  • Recommendation 2: Instead of a single controlled interruption period, ICANN should introduce rolling interruption periods, broken by periods of normal operation, to allow affected end-user systems to continue to function during the 120-day test period with less risk of catastrophic business impact.
  • Recommendation 3: ICANN should perform an evaluation of potential notification approaches against at least the requirements provided by the SSAC prior to implementing any notification approach.
  • Recommendation 4: ICANN should implement a notification approach that accommodates IPv6-only hosts as well as IPv4-only or dual-stack hosts.
  • Recommendation 5: ICANN should provide clarity to registries on the rules and the method of allocation of blocked names after the conclusion of the test period.
  • Recommendation 6: ICANN should consider not taking any actions solely based on the JAS Phase One Report. If action is planned to be taken before the entire report is published, communications to the community should be provided to indicate this clearly.
  • Recommendation 7: ICANN should in due course publish information about not yet disclosed issues.
  • Recommendation 8: ICANN should seek to provide stronger justification for extrapolating findings based on one kind of measurement or data gathering to other situations.