ICANN Announcements

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Attention Domain Name System: Your 30-Year Scheduled Maintenance Is Overdue!

17 April 2018

LOS ANGELES – 17 April 2018 – The Office of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is pleased to announce that the ICANN Domain Name System (DNS) Symposium (IDS 2018) will be held Friday, 13 July 2018, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It takes place back-to-back with this trimester's conference of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 102). The theme for IDS 2018 is "Attention Domain Name System: Your 30-year scheduled maintenance is overdue."

The Domain Name System is well into its thirties. The DNS began as an exercise to improve the scaling properties of mapping host names on the ARPANET to Internet addresses, and to help decentralize email box names. In thirty years, we have evolved from the early experimentation and implementation of the formative domain name standards to a distributed name resolution system with millions of name servers that process billions of queries daily.

The DNS runs exceptionally well – most users think of it as rock solid. But perhaps the system could be made healthier, or could be improved to support further innovation. What if we put the DNS through a scheduled maintenance with the kind of full diagnostic assessment routinely recommended for high-performance vehicles?

For IDS 2018, we are extending an invitation to members of the research, academia, and operational communities. We'd like you to share experiences, data, or innovative thinking on how we might improve the DNS, or how we might foster innovation by adapting the DNS to support emerging identifier needs.

Symposium topics include:

  • Transport issues such as DNS over Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and protocols for DNS beyond User Datagram Protocol (UDP).
  • Operational issues related to the DNS's maturity level, such as those stemming from scaling or protocol complexity.
  • Security issues relating to confidentiality, integrity, and authentication.
  • Role of the DNS in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) incidents and mechanisms for mitigation.
  • Use of the DNS for new applications and new useful DNS data types.
  • Emerging identifier systems and their competition and coexistence with the DNS.

We are soliciting proposals for presentations. Please send a one-paragraph description of your proposed topic to ids-proposals@icann.org by 1 June 2018.

For more information, including schedule and venue information, please visit: https://www.icann.org/ids.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.