[NCAP-Discuss] Fwd: [Ext] JAS no-bid on NCAP Study 1

Tue Sep 3 17:20:03 UTC 2019

Matt,

Thanks.  With respect to

The one glaring failure and our great disappointment is that the IETF has
refused to take-up our Recommendation #1 to clearly create an RFC 1918-like
protected namespace for local use.

I think it would be quite appropriate for ICANN to create a 1918-like
protected namespace for local use.  I don't say this lightly.  My first
choice, and I assume everyone else's, would be for the IETF to do this.
But "the IETF" doesn't exist in the sense of being a fully coherent and
integrated organization with specific people in charge and required to deal
with such issues.  (The IAB is a closer fit in terms of being an organized
body that might take this on, but it has limited bandwidth and chooses its
own agenda.)  Instead, it's a venue for parties interested in a topic to
get together and attempt to reach consensus on a specific topic.

Even if the IETF were to designate some portion of the of the top level
namespace as exclusively for local use. it would be up to ICANN to refuse
to allocate such names into the root.  (Or, perhaps, to include them in the
root in a way that accomplishes the purposes, but that's a topic for later
discussion.) . In contrast, because ICANN has complete control of the root
zone and because the problem we're dealing arose precisely because there
was no 1918-like designation of a portion of the namespace, I'd argue ICANN
has both the authority and responsibility to implement JAS's Recommendation
#1.  ICANN should, of course, use consensus and it should, of course,
maintain communication and coordination with the IETF, but it should
proceed.

Steve

On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 12:47 PM Matt Larson <matt.larson at icann.org> wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> David Conrad and I thought the email below from Jeff Schmidt (who is known
> to most of you based on his firm's previous work on name collisions) was
> worth forwarding to this group, which we are doing with Jeff's permission.
>
> Matt
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> *From: *Jeff Schmidt <jschmidt at jasadvisors.com>
> *Subject: **[Ext] JAS no-bid on NCAP Study 1*
> *Date: *August 27, 2019 at 11:25:49 AM EDT
> *To: *Roy Arends <roy.arends at icann.org>, Matt Larson <
> matt.larson at icann.org>, David Conrad <david.conrad at icann.org>
>
> Hello Team ICANN!
>
> JAS elected not to bid on the NCAP Study 1; thank you for the invitation
> and please keep us in mind for Study 2 if such a study occurs.
>
> Our primary rationale for not bidding on Study 1 is simply that we don’t
> believe we have anything useful to add to the discussion given the limited
> scope of Study 1.  We believe that at this point DNS namespace collisions
> are well understood (albeit by a relatively small technical community) and
> that any further work product from JAS would largely be a restatement of
> our October 2015 Final Report.  In the three years since our Final Report,
> our conclusions have been shown to be largely correct and the mitigation
> strategy we proposed (“Controlled Interruption”) has had the desired
> effects. Many TLDs have been delegated and used in a variety of fashions at
> this point and – as we suggested – the few problems that surfaced were
> isolated and not serious.  Our definition of DNS namespace collisions and
> the causes/etiology as described in Sections 4 and 5 of our report still
> hold.  At the end of the day, we can’t take your money if we don’t believe
> we have anything useful to add.  ;-)
>
> The one glaring failure and our great disappointment is that the IETF has
> refused to take-up our Recommendation #1 to clearly create an RFC 1918-like
> protected namespace for local use.  Until this happens, DNS namespace
> collisions will continue to occur; however, increased awareness should
> reduce the risk of widespread serious future problems (with the “corp-like”
> exception noted below).  Given the lack of clarity of RFC 6762 (including
> errata), this issue will persist until folks are told unambiguously the *
> *right** way to do this.
>
> We believe the datasets available to research collisions are also fairly
> well known – the DNS-OARC DITL data, data that may be made available from
> large recursive operators, and authoritative data acquired by
> acquiring/hosting known colliding domains (the 30+ such domains JAS owns,
> Mike O’Connor’s corp.com, etc).  While these datasets have been available
> for years, extremely limited research interest (essentially zero) has been
> shown in collision-related topics.
>
> JAS remains concerned about the security implications of a small number of
> “special” domains – like .corp – including the ones that have not yet been
> discovered.  The special nature of the string “corp” was not predictable
> a-priori and highly esoteric; all future TLD application rounds should
> contain steps to identify potential corp-like “special” strings requiring
> exceptional treatment.  JAS also remains concerned about the practice of
> “drop catching” which is essentially the intentional discovery and
> monetization of DNS namespace collisions and referenced this practice in
> our Final report and in Recommendation #14.  We would very much appreciate
> the opportunity to assist with these issues at some future point.
>
> Happy to chat further feel free to reach out of course; just wanted to
> make sure I closed the loop since you invited a bid from us.  Please do let
> whomever you select to perform Study 1 know that we’re happy to chat with
> them and provide whatever historical information/assistance we can.
>
> Thank you!
> Jeff
>
>
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