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Carlos Hernandez Ganan

Principal Security, Stability & Resiliency Specialist

Netherlands

Biography

Carlos Ganan joined the ICANN organization on January 2020. He works as Lead Security, Stability and Resiliency Specialist for the Office of the CTO. Previously, Carlos conducted research around DNS abuse and cybercrime as associate professor at Delft University of Technology. In 2012, he completed his PhD in the field of information security for vehicular ad-hoc networks. Previously, in 2008 he completed a MSc on Telecommunications writing a thesis on the safety and security of wireless sensor networks at Philips Laboratories in Aachen. After that, in 2010 he received an MSc in Telematics during which he studied the secure transmission of video streaming for mobile ad-hoc networks. In the past, he was part of the Information Security Group, with the Department of Telematics Engineering at UPC, Barcelona. He also holds a Diploma in Business Studies and a Degree in Administration and Business Management from the Open University of Catalonia.

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."