North American Network Operators Group

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Re: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs

  • From: Roger Marquis
  • Date: Sun Jun 29 17:46:02 2008

Stephane Bortzmeyer [email protected] wrote:
I am very curious of what tests a "security-aware programmer" can do,
based on the domain name, which will not be possible tomorrow, should
ICANN allow a few more TLDs.

The difference between '[a-z0-9\-\.]*\.[a-z]{2-5}' and '[a-z0-9\-\.]*\.[a-z\-]*' is substantial from a security perspective. Aside from the IP issues it effectively precludes anyone from defining a hostname that cannot also be someone else's domain name. It's not too hard to see the problems with that. An analogous network scenario would be IP addresses of varying length and without a netmask.

If you test that the TLD exists... it will still work.

Only if A) you are always online with B) reliable access to the tld's nameserver/s, and C) can deal with the latency. In practice this is often not the case.

If you test that the name matches (com|net|org|[a-z]{2}), then you are
not what I would call a "security-aware programmer".

Will you still think that when someone buys the right to the .nic tld and starts harvesting your queries and query related traffic? Not that that doesn't happen now, to a far lesser degree. But it's the extent to which this presents new opportunities for black hats that should have given ICANN pause. Odds are that RBLs will be among the first targets.

Bottom line is the decision was made for it's _monetization_ value, not
security, and customer service was just a pretense.

Roger Marquis