Dave Piscitello, on behalf of the ICANN Security Team In recent weeks, numerous high profile organizations and financial institutions have been targets of massive service disruption attacks. Several of these attacks are characteristically similar to attacks against top level domain name servers in 2006. ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee published an Advisory, SAC008 [PDF, [...]

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In December we spoke of the planned changes to the IPv4 Reverse DNS Infrastructure where the zone maintenance of the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone would transition to ICANN and be managed concurrently with the central assignment of address space to the RIRs. ICANN would like to announce that the transition of the technical management function for the [...]

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The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and ICANN are together planning changes to the infrastructure which supports the IPv4 Reverse DNS — that is, the part of the DNS which provides the ability to look up an IPv4 address and convert it to a name. The IPv4 Reverse DNS uses the special domain IN-ADDR.ARPA. [...]

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Because IPv6 is so much larger than IPv4, the IETF has been able to structure the address space more neatly.  Consequently, it is easier to distinguish between different address types based on the first few characters in the address, rather than having to refer to registry, as is often the case with IPv4. Nonetheless, there [...]

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This blog post is primarily intended to update the many people in the technical community and ccTLD community about activities related to Synchronized IDN ccTLDs. As you may know, one of the ICANN Board resolutions from the recent ICANN meeting in Nairobi directed staff to develop an extension to the Fast Track Process: a mechanism [...]

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The first four IDN ccTLD requests has just been announced as having completed the String Evaulation portion of the Fast Track Process. These are associated with: Egypt, the Russian Federation, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. See the full announcement here: http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-21jan10-en.htm So what does that mean? It means that these may now initiate the [...]

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I’ve previously written about the problem with IPv4 /8s which have been used to number IP networks in an unofficial and improper way. The problem is that the unofficial usage makes it more difficult for ISPs to bring these addresses into use when they are officially allocated and so less desirable. But we have to [...]

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Some IPv4 /8s have been used to number IP networks in an unofficial and improper way. That is, they have been used without being properly allocated and registered in a public Whois database. In most cases these networks are mostly private, used internally in their organization, and so the addresses are not seen in the Internet’s routing system. The organizations using these addresses have relied on the overall availability of IPv4 addresses so that there was no pressing need to allocate all of the /8s that IANA manages. With the decreasing IANA free pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses, it is now clear that every last one of them will ultimately be allocated to the RIRs.

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In managing the root zone, recently we clarified some of the technical conformance criteria for the name servers top-level domain operators use. Before we put the adjusted criteria in place, we did some research to find out real world compliance against some of the metrics. One of the more interesting insights involved looking at network [...]

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