Administrator of Domain Name System Launches Global Multistakeholder Accountability Process

14 March 2014

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today launched a process to transition the role of the United States Government relating to the Internet’s unique identifiers system.

SOURCE: http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-14mar14-en.htm

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What is Namecoin?

Namecoin is an open source cryptocurrency operating on a distributed blockchain network. Namecoin’s key feature is it’s secure key/pair data storage which also acts as decentralized domain name system for the global top level domain “.bit”. It’s identified by the symbol ℕ; and short code NMC.

https://www.namecoin.org

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Identifier Technology Innovation

Panel — Draft Report

Feb 21, 2014

Quick extract:

(Note that we aren’t proposing the rules, just a distributed system for implementing whatever rules the community wants.)

The participants could then each do a standard algorithm to generate consistent state. This might seem like a fantasy, but Byzantine algorithms like Bitcoin [Andreesen 2014] and Namecoin show that such systems are possible today.

Section Extract:

4.3. Shared Zone Control

In the previous section, we discussed the political feelings that make countries want to own a root server organization. These concerns may or may not be well founded, but there is no question that the current root operation is based in the US and subject to US jurisdiction.

In simple outline, the root is updated in a sequence:

 ICANN receives update requests from TLDs, and vets them for errors

 ICANN submits the changes to the Department of Commerce

 ICANN sends approved changes to Verisign

 Verisign generates a signed root and distributes it

Is there a technical way to think about sharing control over the root? Some theories have been advanced. One school of thought is that data should have N multiple signatures. And then M/N,

signatures are required to authenticate the data. Of course there are arguments about M and N, and whether different crypto is needed/desirable.

It’s not our intention to argue for a specific system here, but we do feel that a good design could allow the political process of deciding how control should be shared to start. Our vision is the creation of a toolbox for shared zone control, not only for the root, but also for other zone coordination problems.

We note that the DNS Operations (DNSOPS) working group in the IETF has two proposals for coordinating DNSSEC signing information, but wonder if it might be better to create a general facility rather than a solution to this point problem. Coordination of forward and reverse addresses might be another application.

So what’s required? We speculate that the right model is one in which all of the parties sharing controlhave a set of capabilities:

 A system for initiating a shared zone consisting of the zone itself, rules, and individual journals for each of the participants to post their requests and actions

 Each type of request is visible to all of the other participants who can approve, disapprove, or timeout

 Rules define what happens to a request

o One type of a rule is a vote which defines the conditions for a request to succeed. This might include a delay for all parties to have time to consider the request.

 For ccTLDs the WSIS rules would dictate 1 of N, so each Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) could unilaterally change its own data.

Other domains might use a simple majority

o Specified delays could be important so that others might be able to point out operational issues and let the requesters reconsider

o Different conditions might apply for different operations, such as creating a new vs.

editing, etc.

The participants could then each do a standard algorithm to generate consistent state. This might seem like a fantasy, but Byzantine algorithms like Bitcoin [Andreesen 2014] and Namecoin show that such systems are possible today.

(Note that we aren’t proposing the rules, just a distributed system for implementing whatever rules the community wants.)