SIDN Labs will be presenting several of its research projects at the 58th ICANN meeting, which takes place in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 11 to 16 March. In this blog, I’ll provide a quick overview of what we’ll be presenting where and link to the ICANN58 agenda and other material for more details.
CDAR Final Report (Monday, March 13)
On Monday, we’ll be presenting the final report (pdf) of the CDAR study (a.k.a. “root stability study”) that we carried out together with our colleagues at TNO and NLnet Labs. The report discusses our technical assessment of the impact on the DNS root server system of the 1,100+ new gTLDs that have been delegated since October 2013 as part of the New gTLD Program. The final report addresses the feedback that we received from the ICANN community after we published our draft report in October of last year. ICANN awarded the project to the CDAR consortium after a public call for proposals in late 2015. Our presentation is part of the session on New gTLD Program Reviews.
Uptake of Let’s Encrypt (Monday, March 13)
Also on Monday, Maarten Aertsen of the Netherlands National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) will report on “No domain left behind: is Let's Encrypt democratizing encryption?”, an empirical study on the uptake of Let’s Encrypt certificates that SIDN Labs carried out with the NCSC and Delft University of Technology. The presentation is part of Tech Day, and details of the work are in a paper that we have written (pdf). (BTW: Giovane Moura will also present the study at IETF98 in Chicago, at the meetings of the IRTF MAPRG and IRTF HRCP working groups.)
SADAG (Tuesday, March 14)
On Tuesday, Maarten Wullink and Dr Maciej Korczynski will be providing an update on the project “Statistical Analysis of DNS Abuse in gTLDs” (SADAG), which ICANN awarded to SIDN Labs and of Delft University of Technology at the end of 2016 The presentation will provide an overview of the study so far and will discuss the methodology and datasets we used. ICANN has organised a separate session for this purpose. Maarten and Maciej will also present their work to two review teams: Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice and Security, Stability and Resiliency.
Registry of the Future (Wednesday, March 15)
On Wednesday, I will provide an overview of our technical vision of “The Registry of the Future”, which is based on the paper (pdf) that we published in the Network and Service Management Series of IEEE Communications Magazine in January (we recently learned that the acceptance rate was only 11.1% :-)). My talk will be part of the News Session of the ccNSO Members Day.
TLD-OPS (Sunday, March 12)
Finally, I will be chairing the TLD-OPS Workshop on the collaborative detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks, which will take place on Sunday. TLD-OPS is the incident response community for and by ccTLDs, which aims to strengthen collaborative security for all ccTLDs at a global level. TLD-OPS currently brings together around 330 incident response people from 187 different ccTLDs (64% of all ccTLDs worldwide), who actively share security information that helps them improve the security posture of their own ccTLDs and that of the wider internet.
While TLD-OPS is more about operations than research, I think it’s a highly important initiative. As pointed by Bruce Schneier, DDoS attacks are on the rise and the most recent attacks have been particularly targeting the core DNS infrastructure. (Side note: we have also presented a paper on the Nov 30th Root DNS DDoS events at the ACM IMC 2016). TLD-OPS also provides me with plenty of inspiration for new research projects, which is why I’m happy to chair the workshop and the TLD-OPS Standing Committee.
In Summary: Busy
So, all in all, we have a busy week ahead of us. Good thing I’ll have plenty of time to prepare for it during my 8+ hour train ride to Copenhagen tomorrow :-) !
