On April 27, the XII Safe Internet Forum, organized by the Safe Internet League and the National Center for Assistance to Missing and Injured Children, was held at the Rossiya Segodnya press center.
The Forum discussed the formation of a safe information space, the protection of Russian society from the spread of destructive ideology through modern information technologies and the improvement of the Runet.
The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ held a session “Technological Sovereignty of the Runet Infrastructure”, which was moderated by the Director of the Center Andrey Vorobyev. The session was attended by Olga Baskakova (Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ), Andrey Kuzmichev (RU-CENTER), Vyacheslav Malinochkin (CCITN), Olga Melnikova (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia), Vadim Mikhailov (Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ) , Evgeny Morozov (MSK-IX) and Alexey Rogdev (Technical Center of Internet).
Olga Melnikova, Deputy Director of the Department of International Information Security of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, spoke about the place and role of ICT in international relations and shared information about the negotiation processes launched within the UN at the Russian initiative in recent years and consolidated the intellectual leadership of our country in promoting IIS in the international arena. This is the Open-Ended Working Group on Security in the Use of ICTs and ICTs 2021-2025 and the Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes. “The approaches and initiatives promoted by our country are widely approved by members of the world community who are interested in ensuring the security of using ICT and preventing any conflicts related to their use,” Olga Melnikova said.
Olga Baskakova spoke about the work of the Domain Patrol project. She noted a sharp increase in the number of requests from competent organizations to registrars in 2023. So, a little more than 16,000 such requests were received for the whole 2022, and only in the first 4 months of 2023, more than 12,000 requests were transferred to registrars. More than 90% of devoted to phishing, and today phishing has become the number one problem both in Russia and in the world. Olga Baskakova stated that in order to solve this problem, it is necessary to improve the legal framework, investigate each incident and promptly introduce registration of domain names using the Unified Identification and Authentication System (ESIA).
In his speech, Vadim Mikhailov discussed the situation at hand today in Cyrillic domain names and email addresses. After a short historical digression into the topic of the internationalization of the domain addressing system, Vadim described the problems that users face today. “The advent of internationalized email addresses and domain names has led to technical problems with their handling by applications that were originally designed to work only with Latin addresses. The community's response to this problem was the emergence of the concept of Universal Acceptance - a state when all Internet-based applications, devices and systems correctly and uniformly accept, verify, store, process and display all correct domain names and email addresses,” said Vadim Mikhailov. Today we see that there are standards, software, ready-made libraries for popular programming languages and user interest - and these factors can serve as the fastest implementation of the UA. And the process is slowed down by the very low rate of implementation of the Universal Acceptance in state and municipal platforms, as well as the extremely weak interest in this area among domestic IT giants.
Aleksey Rogdev, General Director of the Technical Center of Internet, presented to the participants data on the current situation with the TLS ecosystem in Russia. The speaker called the task of today the creation of a distributed TLS ecosystem in Russia based on domestic solutions. He presented a solution from the Technical Center of Internet - TCI Certification Center. Today, the Center issues both ECDSA and all-Union State Standard certificates for one domain and Wildcard, ECDSA certificates for e-mail (S/MIME), supports Yandex and Vkontakte Certificate Transparency Log. And the company plans to add functionality for issuing certificates for code signing, as well as the creation of a corporate certification center.
Vyacheslav Malinochkin spoke about the prospects for further development of domestic solutions and scenarios for expanding their use at the national and international levels. He described in detail how the Standard Domestic Module for the Study of Internet Technologies (TOMIIT), created back in 2019, is used in the educational process today, and also presented a project to create an authoritative DNS name server based on domestic hardware and software.
MSK-IX General Director Evgeny Morozov spoke about how the DNS management system for national Russian domains is being built today, about the principles of monitoring the DNS service and DNS servers, as well as about the new multifunctional OSS (Operation Support System) developed in MSK-IX, which monitors the DNS of national domains .RU, .РФ, .SU.
Russian registrars have faced a number of problems related to sanctions pressure, according to Andrey Kuzmichev, CEO of the largest Russian registrar, who himself faced these difficulties. “But we overcame all the problems. Users who wanted to transfer domains from foreign to Russian registrars were able to do it. I want to note that in this non-standard situation, the solidarity of the global registrar community, which acted in the interests of users, manifested itself,” Andrey Kuzmichev said.
Summing up the session, moderator Andrey Vorobyev noted that the dialogue between the industry and the Russian Foreign Ministry turned out to be very productive and useful for both parties. “I am sure that these contacts will continue, and with the help of colleagues from the Foreign Ministry we will be able to find optimal solutions to the problems that the industry is facing today due to sanctions,” Andrey Vorobyev concluded.
