Over the past two months the Internet has faced yet another threat to its security and one that directly involves the Domain Name System.

The Conflicker/Downadup worm infects computers running Windows operating systems variants. The infected computers can be remotely controlled (i.e. forming a botnet) and the infection propagates through a number of different routes. The worm has been estimated as infecting as many as 10 million hosts and data from the security community indicates the number is at least 1.5 million. One mechanism the worm’s code uses to enable control is to download commands by accessing specific date-based domain names.

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This Briefing Note for the Cairo meeting was first published on the Cairo meeting site on 13 November (see: http://cai.icann.org/en/briefing-note). It was reprinted the following day in the November edition of the ICANN magazine (see: http://www.icann.org/en/magazine/archive/magazine-200811-en.html).

What was it?

ICANN’s 33nd international public meeting was the third held this year to conduct policy development and outreach. It was hosted by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and the Government of Egypt.

The meeting was opened by Dr. Tarek Mohamed Kamel, Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology. There were 1,702 attendees from 144 different countries. The participants engaged in a wide range of discussions about the Internet’s domain name system and related issues.

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This is a Response and Summary to the Cairo public forum that took place on 6 November 2008.

A PDF version of this document is available at: http://www.icann.org/en/participate/cairo-public-forum-response.pdf

Note from the Chairman:

One of the most significant features of ICANN meetings is the Public Forum, where members of the ICANN community are able to present their views on issues of concern to them to the ICANN Board, in public session. The fact that we rotate meetings through each of the geographic sectors of the world enhances the opportunity that people from every region to present their views to the ICANN Board, in the presence of Staff and the whole ICANN community.

As a long-time participant from the floor presenting views, in my case from the ccTLD community, I am well aware of the time, effort and expense that goes into the preparation of such statements. As a board member, I have valued hearing those submissions, from individuals, governments and constituencies. I am determined as Chair to continue this tradition, and to maximise the opportunities for information sharing it represents.

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One of the main IDN related topics from the just-finished ICANN meeting in Cairo that I think deserves some additional attention was:

Why Compliance with IDN technical requirements are a necessity on a global scale

Overall compliance with technical standards are important for TLD registry operators in order to keep their TLD stable and secure and in that way function and work well for their consumers and communities. Per ICANN Bylaws, interoperability of the Internet is a core value, which requires that technical standards are complied with. In some instances failure to comply with technical standards will only affects the corresponding TLD in isolation and does not interfere with other TLDs – when moving to the topic of IDN TLDs however this fact changes very quickly.

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On 10-11 September 2008, ICANN hosted its third Asia/Pacific regional gathering in Seoul, Korea. The regional gathering approach to broadening participation in the ICANN process for gTLD registries and ICANN-accredited registrars was first introduced in February 2005 in Brussels, Belgium. And, since that time, ICANN has conducted annually three outreach events – one each in the Asia/Pacific, Europe and North America regions. As the participation in the community continues to expand to all parts of the world, ICANN anticipates adjusting the model to include other areas such as Latin America/Caribbean Islands, South America, Africa and the Middle East.

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It is sometimes said that ISPs do not offer IPv6 transport and equipment vendors offer just partial IPv6 support because there is no customer demand. The counter argument is often made that consumers can only buy what is on offer so people prefer to buy production quality services and equipment.

Unfortunately, even when production quality IPv6 transport and network infrastructure are available it is not always possible to deploy a completely IPv6 accessible network. One problem is the difficulties domain name registrants have when they ask their domain name registrar to include their IPv6 glue in the DNS. Not many domain name registrars support glue registration for IPv6 addresses. This limits their ability to provide an IPv6 DNS service.

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Read the Dubai Briefing Note

ICANN’s second regional meeting will open its doors in Dubai tomorrow, Tuesday 1 April.

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Last week we improved the format of the IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry. It is now much easier to see which address space is available for allocation to RIRs and which address space is reserved for Multicast and Future Use.

We made other changes, too. The IPv4 registry used to report that a lot of /8s were allocated to “Various Registries”. That wasn’t very helpful to anyone; it was a bit like saying “we don’t know”. In fact, the RIRs have been providing DNS and Whois services for addresses in these /8s but the IANA IPv4 registry didn’t indicate which RIR to consult because addresses in each of these /8s are often used by organisations in different RIR regions.

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ICANN announced earlier today that it is seeking expressions of interest from auction design experts (see Announcement).

ICANN has identified several areas where auctions might be an appropriate tool, such as the efficient disposition of data from terminated registrars and registries, the allocation of single-character second-level domain names, and perhaps, resolution of contention between competing commercial applicants for identical strings in the application process for new generic Top Level Domains.

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