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SAC062 - ICANN SSAC Advisory Concerning the Mitigation of Name Collision Risk

ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) Reports and Advisories, ICANN (2013)

Abstract

The term “name collision” refers to the situation in which a name that is properly defined in one operational domain or naming scope may appear in another domain (in which it is also syntactically valid), where users, software, or other functions in that domain may misinterpret it as if it correctly belonged there. The circumstances that may cause this can be accidental or malicious. In the context of Top Level Domains (TLDs), the conflicting namespaces are the DNS namespace defined in the root zone as published by the root management partners (ICANN, U.S. Dept. of Commerce National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA), and VeriSign) and any privately defined namespace, whether that namespace is defined only for the Domain Name System (DNS) or is also intended to “work” for other namespaces such as Active Directory