Exploring Future Internet Architectures

• By • Domain Names

UCLA and Washington University in St. Louis recently announced the launch of the Named Data Networking (NDN) Consortium, a new forum for collaboration among university and industry researchers, including Verisign, on one candidate next-generation information-centric architecture for the internet.

Verisign Labs has been collaborating with UCLA Professor Lixia Zhang, one of the consortium’s co-leaders, on this future-directed design as part our university research program for some time. The consortium launch is a natural next step in facilitating this research and its eventual application.

Van Jacobson, an Internet Hall of Fame member and the other co-leader of the NDN Consortium, surveyed developments in this area in his October 2012 talk in the Verisign Labs Distinguished Speaker Series titled, “The Future of the Internet? Content-Centric Networking.”

As I stated in my summary of the talk, content-centric networking and related research areas under the heading of information-centric networking and NDN bring internet protocols up to date to match the way many of us already are using the internet. As Van noted, when people want to access content over the internet– for instance the recording of his talk – they typically reference a URL, for instance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zOLrQJ5kbU.

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New from Verisign Labs: Measuring the Leakage of Onion at the Root

• By • Security

If you are trying to communicate anonymously on the internet using Tor, this paper may be an important read for you. Anonymity and privacy are at the core of what the Tor project promises its users. Short for The Onion Router, Tor provides individuals with a mechanism to communicate anonymously on the internet. As part of its offerings, Tor provides hidden services, specifically anonymous networking between servers that are configured to receive inbound connections only through Tor. In order to route requests to these hidden services, a namespace is used to identify the resolution requests to such services. Tor uses the .onion namespace under a non-delegated (pseudo) top-level-domain. Although the Tor system was designed to prevent .onion requests from leaking into the global DNS resolution process, numerous requests are still observed in the global DNS, causing concern about the severity of the leakage and the exposure of sensitive private data.

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Is it Time for a Registration Operations Industry Association? Part III

• By • Domain Names

In Parts I and II of this series of blog posts I described the need for a registration operations industry association. At the end of Part II, I wrote that Part III will describe “an opportunity for everyone that’s interested in discussing this topic in a live environment.” The large number of people attending ICANN 51 in Los Angeles presents the best chance of discussion with many potential participants being in the same place at the same time. Let’s take advantage of that proximity.

Verisign will host a workshop for all interested people during the week of ICANN 51. The event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel (the same venue for ICANN 51, though this event is not affiliated with ICANN) on the morning of Thursday, October 16, 2014, to discuss the challenges of registration technical operations and to explore ways to address those challenges. We’ve set up a website at www.regiops.net to provide information, describe the event, and allow people to register. We’re asking people to register in advance so we can make sure that we have a large enough room reserved and that we provide enough food for breakfast and lunch.

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Is it Time for a Registration Operations Industry Association? Part II

• By • Domain Names

In Part I of this series of blog posts I described the need for an industry association of operators to discuss the technical tasks, such as the development, deployment, and ongoing systems administration of the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), performed by registries and registrars to ensure interoperability and share best practices when providing registration services. In this blog post I’ll describe a way to make that happen.

I’ve spoken to a number of registrars who have described the challenges they face in implementing the many different EPP extensions being developed by registry operators. Here’s a concrete example: the Net::DRI Perl implementation of an EPP client includes contact extensions for 24 different registries. A registrar that wishes to manage contacts with those registries needs to implement a contact extension for each one! With the addition of new gTLDs and many new registry operators with new business models the number of extensions can only increase. How would an industry association address these challenges and reduce confusion for everyone? How could an association be structured?

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Is it Time for a Registration Operations Industry Association?

• By • Domain Names

Since 2001 there have been occasional conversations on technical mailing lists exploring the concept of creating an independent industry association or consortium of domain registration operators. My recent experiences with the evolution of extensions to the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) have convinced me to look at these suggestions more closely, and I’m now convinced that this is an idea worth exploring.

“Registration Operations” refers to the technical tasks, such as the development, deployment, and ongoing systems administration of EPP, performed by registries and registrars to provide registration services. While EPP is used to provide domain name registration and management services, registration operations also include the tasks performed by Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) to provide address registration and systems administration services.

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New from Verisign Labs – Measuring Privacy Disclosures in URL Query Strings

• By • Security
Have you ever gone to socially share or email a URL and found that it was much longer than you had expected? Take the following contrived URL as an example:

http://www.example.com/path/submit.php?user=userabc&pageid=012345&utm_referrer=rss&localtime=+0500

In your personal experience, as in our example, you might have realized that the URL was as much about you, the client, as it was about the web resource you were trying to access. Indeed, internet addresses may contain a wealth of information about the identities and activities of the users visiting them. URLs often utilize query strings (i.e., key-value pairs appended to the URL path; in our example, everything after the question mark) as a means to pass session parameters and form data. While sometimes benign and necessary to render the web page, query strings often contain tracking mechanisms, user names, email addresses and other information that users may not wish to publicly reveal. In isolation this is not particularly problematic, but the growth of web 2.0 platforms such as social networks and micro-blogging means such URLs are increasingly being publicly broadcast.

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Solving Challenges of Scale in Data and Language

• By • Domain Names

It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the early internet operated on the scale of kilobytes, with all spoken languages represented using a single character encoding – ASCII. Today’s global internet, so fundamental to society and the world’s economy, now enables access to orders of magnitude more information, connecting a speakers of a full spectrum of languages.

The research challenges continue to scale along with data volumes and user diversity.

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The Real Uneven Playing Field of Name Collisions

• By • Security

Recent comments on the name collisions issue in the new gTLD program raise a question about the differences between established and new gTLDs with respect to name collisions, and whether they’re on an even playing field with one another.

Verisign’s latest public comments on ICANN’s “Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions” Phase One Report, in answering the question, suggest that the playing field the industry should be concerned about is actually in a different place. The following points are excerpted from the comments submitted April 21.

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Introducing getdns: a Modern, Extensible, Open Source API for the DNS

• By • Security

Verisign is pleased to announce the public introduction of getdns at The Next Web in Amsterdam (TNWEurope) April 23-24, 2014. Verisign Labs and NLNet Labs in collaboration have developed getdns, an open source implementation of the getdns-api application programming interface (api) specification.

At The Next Web, getdns is one of the challenge APIs in a 36-hour Hack Battle. Multiple teams of application coding experts are using getdns to develop innovative applications that leverage the global security infrastructure available through DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC).

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Proceedings of Name Collisions Workshop Available

• By • Security

Presentations, papers and video recordings from the name collisions workshop held earlier this month in London are now available at the workshop web site, namecollisions.net.

The goal for the workshop, described in my “colloquium on collisions” post, was that researchers and practitioners would “speak together” to keep name spaces from “striking together.” The program committee put together an excellent set of talks toward this purpose, providing a strong, objective technical foundation for dialogue. I’m grateful to the committee, speakers, attendees and organizers for their contributions to a successful two-day event, which I am hopeful will have benefit toward the security and stability of internet naming for many days to come.

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