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Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob

Director, Security, Stability and Resiliency Research

Netherlands

Biography

Samaneh is a Principal Security, Stability & Resiliency (SSR) Specialist reporting to John Crain, Chief Security, Stability & Resiliency Officer and is part of the Office of CTO (OCTO) group. She is based in ICANN’s Europe Region and will be working remotely from the Netherlands. As the SSR Specialist, Samaneh works in close coordination with other ICANN organization functions to implement ICANN’s Security, Stability and Resiliency strategies. Samaneh carries out research on DNS security and abuse. She also represents ICANN on matters relating to the SSR of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers within ICANN’s remit as well as helping to develop technical work, positions and produce materials related to the administration of those identifiers from an SSR perspective.

Samaneh is from a multi-disciplinary background. While she is an Electronics Engineer by training, she studied Engineering and Policy Analysis for her masters. She holds a PhD degree in Internet Security and Data Analytics from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She worked as a Post-Doctoral researcher at the same university where she did research on banking security and underground markets utilizing advanced statistical techniques and machine learning.

She has collaborated with other research teams as a visiting scholar; at KU Leuven, DistriNet Research Group she worked on Internet measurements to estimate web vulnerabilities and measure patching practices of hosting servers. Additionally, she worked with scholars from the security and privacy lab at University of Innsbruck on designing abuse metrics that can reliably measure security performance of Internet identifiers.

Samaneh has authored publications on web security, cyber security, Internet measurements, underground economy, and development of security metrics design using advance statistical methods.

Samaneh speaks English, Farsi, Dutch and has basic knowledge in Arabic. She is a big fan of board games. In her free time, she runs, plays tennis, and piano.

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."