[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] international law enforcement association resolution regarding domain registration data
Gomes, Chuck
cgomes at verisign.com
Wed Apr 26 14:44:53 UTC 2017
Tim,
You are correct that we all have our biases; that is why we require SOIs. We wouldn’t be volunteering our time if we didn’t.
Chuck
From: gnso-rds-pdp-wg-bounces at icann.org [mailto:gnso-rds-pdp-wg-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of Chen, Tim
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2017 11:41 PM
To: allison nixon <elsakoo at gmail.com>
Cc: RDS PDP WG <gnso-rds-pdp-wg at icann.org>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [gnso-rds-pdp-wg] international law enforcement association resolution regarding domain registration data
"And I hope more stakeholders in this multi-stakeholder process will come forward with their own perspectives, as they will differ from mine."
happy to do so. DomainTools is clearly a stakeholder in this debate. and we have a fair amount of experience around the challenges, benefits and risks of whois data aggregation at scale.
from the beginning of this EWG/RDS idea we've stood down bc i didn't believe our opinion would be seen as objective-enough given our line of business. but it is apparent to me having followed this debate for many weeks now, that this is a working group of individuals who all bring their own biases into the debate. whether they care to admit that to themselves or not. so we might as well wade in too. bc I think our experience is very relevant to the discussion.
i'll do my best to be as objective as I can, as a domain registrant myself and as an informed industry participant.
since our experience is working with security minded organizations, that is the context with which I will comment.
since this is an ICANN working group, I start with the ICANN mission statement around the security and stability of the DNS. I find myself wanting to fit this debate to that as the north star. i do not see the RDS as purpose driven to fit the GDPR or any region-specific legal resolution. but I do see those as important inputs to our discussion.
from a security perspective, my experience is that the benefits of the current Whois model, taken with this lens, far outweigh the costs. again, I can only speak from my experience here at DomainTools, and obviously under the current Whois regime. This is not to say it cannot be improved. From a data accuracy perspective alone there is enormous room for improvement as I think we can all agree. every day I see the tangible benefits to security interests, which for the most part are "doing good", from the work that we do. when I compare that to the complaints that we get bc "my PII is visible in your data", it's not even close by my value barometer (which my differ from others'). this is relevant bc any future solution will be imperfect as I have mentioned before. as Allison and others point out we need to measure the harm done by any new system that may seek to solve one problem (privacy?) and inadvertently create many more. since this group is fond of analogies I'll contribute one from the medical oath (not sure if this is just U.S.) "first, do no harm".
i'll close by saying I think Allison's point about economic value has merit. yes, the point of the WG is not to protect anyone's economic interest. I agree 100% with that statement and will disagree with anyone who thinks the future of DomainTools or other commercial service should have one iota of impact on this discussion. but I also think "it's too expensive" or "it's too hard" are weak and dangerous excuses when dealing with an issue like this which has enormous and far reaching consequences for the very mission of ICANN around the security and stability of our internet.
Tim
On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 3:50 PM, allison nixon <elsakoo at gmail.com<mailto:elsakoo at gmail.com>> wrote:
Thanks for the documentation in your earlier email. While I understand that's how things are supposed to work in theory, it's not implemented very widely, and unless there is enforcement, then it's unlikely to be useful at all.
"as a given, we put ourselves in a certain position in terms of the actions we can and cannot recommend. We can make similar statements focused on registry operators, registrars, or any other stakeholder in this space. If we all approach this WG's task with the goal of not changing anything, we're all just wasting our time."
There are things that people would be willing to change about WHOIS. Changes purely relating to the data format would not be as controversial. Changing to that RDAP json format would probably be an agreeable point to most here.
There are two different major points of contention here. The first is the data format, second is the creation of a new monopoly and ceding power to it. By monopoly I mean- who are the gatekeepers of "gated" access? Will it avoid all of the problems that monopolies are historically prone to? Who will pay them? It seems like a massive leap of faith to commit to this without knowing who we are making the commitment to.
"I do not believe it is this WG's responsibility to protect anyone's
commercial services if those things are basically in response to
deficiencies in the existing Whois protocol. "
From my understanding of past ICANN working groups, registrars have fought against issues that would have increased their costs. And the destruction of useful WHOIS results(or becoming beholden to some new monopoly) stand to incur far more costs for far larger industries. So this shouldn't surprise you. If those economic concerns are not valid then I question why the economic concerns of registrars are valid.
If entire industries are built around a feature you would consider a "deficiency", then your opinion may solely be your own. And I hope more stakeholders in this multi-stakeholder process will come forward with their own perspectives, as they will differ from mine.
"Not trying to hamstring the WG. Just asking if this is not something that has already been solved.."
Hi Paul,
It's an interesting thought. This document was recommended to me as one that was approved in the past by the working group that outlined what the resulting system might look like. I'm still learning and reading about these working groups and what they do, and this document is massive.
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/final-report-06jun14-en.pdf
In the document, it says: "Central to the remit of the EWG is the question of how to design a system that increases the accuracy of the data collected while also offering protections for those Registrants seeking to guard and maintain their privacy."
One of the things I notice is that any talk about actually increasing accuracy of whois info- via enforcement- is vigorously opposed in this group, and it's merely assumed that people will supply better quality data under the new system.
Throughout the document it talks about use-cases and features (whois history, reverse query, etc), which are indeed identical to the features of the whois aggregators of current day. Such a system would replace them. Will the service quality be as good?
On page 63 it gets into thoughts on who would be "accredited" to access the gated whois data. Every proposed scenario seems to recognize the resulting system will need to handle a large query volume from a large number of people, and one proposes accrediting bodies which may accredit organizations which may accredit individuals. It even proposes an abuse handling system which is also reminiscent in structure to how abuse is handled currently in our domain name system. Many of these proposed schemes appear to mimic the ways that the hosting industry and registrar industry operate, so we can expect that the patterns of abuse will be equally frequent, especially if higher quality data is supplied.
The proposed scenarios all paint a picture of "gated" access with very wide gates, while simultaneously representing to domain purchasers that their data is safe and privacy protected. And this is supposed to *reduce* the total number of privacy violations? This doesn't even appeal to me as a consumer of this data.
Whoever sets up this system also stands to inherit a lot of money from the soon-to-be-defunct whois aggregation industry. They would certainly win our contract, because we would have no choice. All domain reputation services, anti-spam, security research, etc, efforts will all need to pay up.
After being supplied with the above document, I also saw a copy of a rebuttal written by a company that monitors abusive domains. I strongly agree with the sentiments in this document and I do not see evidence that those concerns have received fair consideration. While I do not see this new gatekeeper as an existential threat, I do see it as a likely degradation in the utility i do see from whois. To be clear, we do not do any business with this company.
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/input-to-ewg/attachments/20130823/410038bb/LegitScriptCommentsonICANNEWGWhoisReplacementStructure-0001.pdf
I also found John Bambenek's point in a later thread to be interesting- concentrating WHOIS knowledge solely to one organization allows the country it resides in to use it to support its intelligence apparatus, for example monitoring when its espionage domains are queried for, and targeting researchers that query them (since anonymous querying will be revoked). Nation states already use domains in operations so this monopoly is a perfect strategic data reserve. The fact that this system is pushed by privacy advocates is indeed ironic.
None of those concerns appear to have been addressed by this group in any serious capacity. Before the addition of new members, I don't think many people had the backgrounds or skillsets to even understand why they are a concern. But I think this is a discussion worth having at this point in time for this group.
On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 1:50 PM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at anvilwalrusden.com<mailto:ajs at anvilwalrusden.com>> wrote:
Hi,
On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 07:25:47PM +0200, Paul Keating wrote:
> Andrew,
>
> Thank you. That was helpful.
>
> ""Given this registrant, what other
> domains are registered?" is a solved problem, and has been since the
> early 2000s.²
>
> This is also traceable via alternative means such as consistencies in
> various WHOIS fields such as email, address, name, etc.
Well, sort of. The email, address, and name fields are _user_
supplied. So they come from the other party to the transaction. The
ROID is assigned by the registry itself. So once you have a match,
you know that you are looking at the same object, only the same
object, and all the same object(s).
Email addresses in particular are guaranteed unique in the world at
any given time (though not guaranteed as unique identifiers over
time), so they may be useful for these purposes. Take it from someone
named "Andrew Sullivan", however, that names are pretty useless as
context-free identifiers :)
> In reality finding out answers to questions such as
> yours (above) requires investigation using a plethora of data.
To be clear, finding out the answer to what I (meant to) pose(d)
requires no plethora of data: it requires a single query and access to
the right repository (the registry). In some theoretical system, the
correct underlying database query would be something like this:
SELECT domain_roid, domain_name FROM domains WHERE registrant_roid = ?;
and you put the correct ROID in where the question mark is, and off
you go. That will give you the list of all the domain names, and
their relevant ROIDs, registered by a given registrant contact. At
least one registry with which I am familiar once had a WHOIS feature
that allowed something close to the above, only it would stop after
some number of domains so as not to return too much data. I think the
default was therefore LIMIT 50, but I also think the feature was
eventually eliminated about the time that the ICANN community rejected
IRIS as an answer to "the whois problem".
What the above will of course not do is help you in the event Bob The
Scammer has created dozens of different contacts for himself by (say)
registering names through many different registrars. I do not believe
that any registry is going to support such a use at least without
access controls, because it can be expensive to answer such things.
So, what you understood me to be asking, I think, is the question I
did _not_ ask: given this human being or organization, what other
domains are registered?" That does require a lot of different data,
and it requires cross-organizational searches, and it requires sussing
out when someone has lied also. Such research is, I agree, completely
outside the scope of what any technical system will ever be able to
offer reliably.
> An entire
> industry exists for this purpose and I don¹t think we should be
> considering replacing what has already been existing in the cyber security
> marketplace.
I do not believe it is this WG's responsibility to protect anyone's
commercial services if those things are basically in response to
deficiencies in the existing Whois protocol. In this case, however,
that's not the problem. Linking data in multiple databases to a given
real-world human being is hard even in systems without competition and
multiple points of access. It's always going to require researchers
for the domain name system.
Best regards.
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com<mailto:ajs at anvilwalrusden.com>
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