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Champika Wijayatunga

Regional Technical Engagement Manager - APAC

Biography

Champika is an experienced Internet technology and Cybersecurity professional currently part of ICANN's Office of the CTO Team. He represents ICANN in technical and security engagement activities in the Asia Pacific region.

Prior to ICANN, Champika held managerial, specialist and liaison roles at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region. Champika started his career with IBM Corporation as a technical specialist and later worked in IT industry, academia, research, and training environments.

Champika has been regular speaker and a resource person at various international security forums, INTERPOL, Council of Europe etc. Champika received a number of excellence awards during his academic and professional careers and also served in various technical community groups and committees.

Champika holds a postgraduate degree in Computer Science & Engineering and professional education qualifications in Cybersecurity.

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."