SAC078 - SSAC Advisory on Uses of the Shared Global Domain Name Space
Venue
ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) Reports and Advisories, ICANN (2016), pp. 6
Publication Year
2016
Authors
Warren Kumari, Geoff Huston, Lyman Chapin
BibTeX
Abstract
It is widely known that the Domain Name System (DNS) includes both a set of rules
for constructing syntactically valid domain names (the “domain name space”) and a
protocol for associating domain names with data such as IP addresses (“domain name
resolution”). It is less widely understood, however, that DNS name resolution
coexists with other name resolution systems that also use domain names. In many
cases these other name resolution systems deliberately use domain names, rather
than some other naming scheme, for compatibility with the widely deployed
infrastructure of the DNS. They depend on the ability of DNS name resolution
protocols and interface conventions to recognize their domain names but treat them
in some special way. ... The SSAC wishes to ensure that the ICANN Board and ICANN
community are aware of discussions and ongoing work in multiple venues to more
fully define what a namespace is, and how to avoid potential side effects,
including name collisions, across the broad set of name resolution systems and
expectations for their use.
