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Input Group: Law Enforcement Agency Authentication Mechanisms

The Input Group: Law Enforcement Agency Authentication Mechanisms (Input Group) supports the development of a proof of concept for an operationally effective approach to authenticating law enforcement agents who submit requests through the Registration Data Request Service (RDRS) or successor system.

The Generic Names Supporting Organization's RDRS Standing Committee noted as one of its lessons learned from the RDRS two-year pilot the importance of validating the identity of those requesting access to generic top-level domain nonpublic registration data. Following the RDRS pilot's conclusion, the ICANN Board extended RDRS operations an additional two years and voted not to adopt the 18 System for Standardized Access/Disclosure (SSAD) policy recommendations to trigger the process to develop Supplemental Recommendations. As part of the work on these supplemental recommendations, the Board noted to the GNSO Council the importance of the inclusion of policy recommendations related to an authentication mechanism for law enforcement authorities. Such a mechanism would be critical to facilitate urgent request responses as originally envisioned in the SSAD recommendations.

The Input Group is not a policy development body and will not develop policy recommendations. Its role is limited to providing operational and technical input on a proof of concept for authenticating law enforcement requestors.

The Input Group will provide input on workflow design, technical requirements, and authentication processes for a proof of concept to be launched by December 2026. The mechanism would help ensure that law enforcement agents are appropriately authenticated and enable registrars to process urgent requests within the required 24-hour response requirement established by the Registration Data Policy.

Input Group Timeline

June 2026

Begin Input Group formation

July 2026

Input Group meetings begin

October 2026

Present RDRS wireframe changes

December 2026

Begin proof-of-concept testing

March 2027

Publish summary of Input Group findings

FAQs

About the Group

Join the Mailing List to receive meeting invites by emailing [email protected]

Supporting Documents

Charter (coming soon)

Meeting Recordings

Announcements, Blogs, and Webinars

25 June 2026

Blog – Call for Participation: ICANN's Law Enforcement Authentication Input Group
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."