Held this year in the Moscow Region from July 30 until August 8, the CTF 2025 Summer School has upheld its tradition of attracting the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ as its partner for the event.
The gathering targets high school students from ninth to 11th grade, including both members of Russian CTF teams and new members of the CTF movement, as well as students enrolled in cybersecurity degree programs. These young people get to spend an entire week fully immersed in the world of information technology and cybersecurity. They get to meet with like-minded people and enjoy the shade of the Moscow Region’s woodlands. The summer school’s program includes lectures and presentations by leading IT security experts, various assignments on CTF-related topics, training sessions and full-scale A/D competitions, hackathons, and workshops, as well as lab work and a host of other activities.
Domain space security is among the topics covered by the summer school. On Friday, August 1, the Coordination Center’s Infrastructure Consultant Vadim Mikhailov held a lecture titled “Internationalizing domain name and email addressing: History, specific operational aspects and related threats.” He offered a historical perspective on how coded wireless communications evolved from the Morse Code back in the mid-19th century all the way to the Unicode standard, which has been the most common character encoding standard for over 50 years now and covers almost all existing languages. “The Unicode consortium presented the first version of this standard back in 1991, while its 16th iteration came out in September 2024. Compared to the previous version, it added 5,185 new symbols, including seven new emojis, while the total number of symbols reached 154,998,” Vadim Mikhailov pointed out.
In his lecture, Mr. Mikhailov also talked about how the domain name addressing system emerged and its path to internationalization. “The purpose of domain addressing is to offer a user-friendly and convenient addressing system as opposed to the IP addressing system, since the latter is designed for computers, not people,” the lecturer said.
Vadim Mikhailov further elaborated on the emergence of internationalized domain names and email addresses and described how they work. After that, he shared a progress report on Universal Acceptance (UA) and the way the Coordination Center has been contributing to UA with its Поддерживаю.РФ project (“поддерживаю” means “I support” in Russian). It focuses on developing an entire ecosystem for supporting domain names and email addresses in national languages, primarily within .РФ, the Cyrillic TLD.
The lecturer also offered the audience an insight into the threats users may come across in the domain space, in particular, threats related to using domain names and email addresses which are visually similar to one another, including when using IDNs and internationalized email addresses. He shared examples of these attacks and explained ways to deflect them. To conclude his presentation, Vadim Mikhailov said that there is a growing interest in working with online identifiers in local languages, including the Cyrillic alphabet. “We have everything we need for introducing internationalized domain names and email addresses, including online standards, ready-to-use tools and effective solutions from the leading IT companies with their turnkey services, software and software libraries for popular frameworks and coding languages. Taken together, all this means that skills related to supporting internationalization will soon become a must have for any software developer or system administrator,” the lecturer emphasized.
