Fergie's Tech Blog

ICANN RSTEP Reports on .TRAVEL Wildcard

Bret Fausett writes on his ICANN Blog:

ICANN's Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel (another acronym to learn: "RSTEP") has issued its report on the security and stability effects of a new registry service -- a wildcard at the second level of the .TRAVEL TLD -- that Tralliance proposed several months ago:

"The fundamental difficulty presented by the proposed .travel wildcard is that redirection would affect all current and future applications and protocols that rely on the DNS. The effects of redirection could not, given the current state of Internet standards and practice, be restricted to simple HTTP web traffic (the context in which the benefits of the service are intended to be realized). The wildcard would change the definition of a host address and disable the technique that many applications use to detect (and potentially correct) erroneous or misleading input..."

"In summary, while we believe that Tralliance could implement the service that they have proposed, we also conclude that the proposal does create a reasonable risk of a meaningful adverse effect on security and stability to the public Internet."

posted by Fergie @ 11/09/2006 04:52:00 PM