Internet conference focuses on web attacks

WELLINGTON - Proposals to deal with denial of service attacks on the internet are being canvassed at this week's Wellington meeting of the internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Attacks using the domain-name system (DNS) -- a normally invisible system for looking up the internet addresses associated with website and server names -- are becoming increasingly popular.

Last year, attackers used local domain hijacking to send web browsers to fraudulent sites and attempt to scam the users.

Earlier this month internet services provider VeriSign and the US computer emergency readiness team warned that denial-of-service attacks were gaining in popularity.

The Wellington conference, hosted by internetNZ, comprises around 20 separate but related meetings for registries, registrars, country-code managers, intellectual property lawyers, internet users and government representatives, and has attracted about 700 participants from 90 member nations.

ICANN, was designated by the US government in 1998 to handle the internet's name system -- which matches website names to numerical addresses that computers can read.

Paul Twomey, president of ICANN -- which is based in Marina del Rey, California -- said it would hear two recommendations on how to halt specific denial of service attacks which use a domain-name server to change the IP (Internet Protocol) address of targeted websites to a generic format that accepts any traffic, no matter what it is addressed to.

Web sites with these generic addresses become so congested with traffic that browsers take a very long time to download the sites.

Industry sources said one likely result of the increasing use of such attacks was the domain registrars would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars improving their security, raising the threshold for small companies wanting to start registry businesses.

Mr Twomey said recent distributed denial of service attacks had not only targeted domain-name servers but had used those servers to exacerbate the scale of the attacks. Increased security measures to authenticate DNS records could help, but it was likely the hackers and other attacking the integrity of the internet would also lift the level of their attacks.

A second major issue expected to be addressed by the conference -- creation of a "red-light district" domain to host porn -- appears to have been put on the back-burner by the US Government.

The US Commerce Department which set up ICANN has raised concerns about proposed mechanisms for managing the .XXX websites proposed by a Canadian firm, ICM Registry.

ICM has been seeking the right to manage .XXX web addresses, for which it would charge US$60 ($100) each, and its chairman Stuart Lawley said it was the third time the US Government had delayed .XXX addresses, and blamed the continuing delay on religious conservatives in the USA that had political clout.

A third key issue which was to have been addressed in Wellington did not even make it to the agenda: ICANN's previous public conference in Vancouver last November featured acrimonious debate over renewal of a contract with VeriSign.

Internet computers interact with VeriSign millions of times daily to find out how to route email and web traffic, and some critics consider VeriSign a monopoly that tries to abuse its power by offering services that will boost its earnings.

But instead of debating the issue in Wellington, ICANN's directors agreed in a telephone conference, to continue VeriSign's control of all "dotcoms" for another six years, until 2012, with a "presumptive right of renewal" .

Industry observers said there were few changes from the contract which caused controversy in Vancouver and VeriSign will be paid a fixed sum -- at present US$6 ($8.86) every time a dotcom domain is registered or renewed.

With 32 million dotcoms in existence, the business has been described as one of the most profitable on the internet, and VeriSign has powers to boost its fees by 7 per cent each year.

The Wellington conference continues to March 31 and will also consider the ICANN Strategic Plan 2006-2009, continuing reform of ICANN's governmental advisory committee (GAC), a public meeting of the security and stability advisory committee (SSAC) on the stability of the domain name system, and discussion of both policy and technical trial issues in introducing multi-lingual top-level domains known as "internationalised" domain names.

- NZPA