Participants in the second section of the EE DNS Forum 2018, DNS Latest, discussed the latest trends in the development of the internet address system. John Crain from ICANN spoke about why and how DNS traffic is encrypted, and what threats it helps to avoid. He noted that in the modern world, the protection of personal data and security are of paramount importance and this explains the attention to cyber security. The subject was taken up by Dmitry Belyavsky from the Technical Center of Internet, who spoke about the changes that DNS traffic encryption can bring to all stakeholders.
Konstantin Chumachenko from NGENIX analyzed the evolution of the role of DNS in current web architectures. “Since 2015, the web has experienced high loads of streaming media and dynamic web apps, which has caused issues with DNS balancing. White the typical concerns of users in 2015 were “a website is down” or “images load very slowly”, now users are most afraid of being hacked, or that they are talking to a bot rather than a living person and most of all they fear for their security,” Chumachenko said. He noted that DNS servers also need protection from threats, attacks, request interceptions and privacy violation.
Artem Gavrichenkov from Qrator Labs delivered a report on the evolution of DDoS attacks. He said that currently resolvers help counteract DDoS attacks and he spoke about possible future methods of stopping them. Alexandra Kulikova from ICANN told the audience about the root zone KSK rollover that took place on October 11 2018. “The procedure was successful; it was thoroughly planned and took a couple of days.” Kulikova also said that ICANN is currently monitoring the situation after the rollover and analyzing the changes in the network.
At the end of Tech Day, experts spoke about the development of the technologies used in the current domain industry. Dusan Stojicevic from Gransy described the current situation around IDN mail, focusing on how it is being introduced throughout the world. He also noted that global corporations like Microsoft, Google and others already support IDN mail. The only obstacle to its use is the lack of support for UTF8 on mail servers.
Alexey Sozonov from .РУС also touched upon IDN mail and described in detail the successful experience of the operation of Cyrillic mail in the Russian domain. The solution for IDN mail in the .РУС domain was developed together with their Indian colleagues; the testing took two years. “We realized that the absence of IDN mail slowed down the development of Cyrillic domains, and now we see that the Cyrillic mail can work fine on many popular mail servers, and we also take credit for it,” he said. Participants in the section also noted the importance of state support for the use of Cyrillic mail: for instance, it could be a good incentive to include solutions for Russian Cyrillic domains in the registry of Russian software.
Andrey Kolesnikov from the Internet of Things Association, who is also a member of the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee, spoke about how homograph attacks (script spoofing) are used in DNS. “Do you know why it is impossible to stage such an attack in the .РФ domain? Because the domain only uses Cyrillic letters,” the expert said.
Yury Kargapolov from UANIC put forward the interesting idea of using DNS as an infrastructure that provides the operation of the Internet of Things. However, the security implications would need careful consideration before implementing this solution.
Patrick Jones from ICANN concluded the first day of the forum with a report about the possibility of using emojis in domain names. Such domain names would look cute and funny, but will it become another challenge to the stability of the internet?
The EE DNS Forum 2018 continues its work on December 5, please follow our publications.
Online broadcasts are available via: eednsforum.org
