Kim Davies

Kim Davies

Manager, Root Zone Services
Joined on February 23, 2005
Total Post Views: 48,024

About

Kim Davies joined ICANN as IANA Technical Liaison. His primary responsibilities are for DNS root zone management, and other domain name related aspects of IANA’s work.

Kim’s previous role was as Technical Policy Advisor to CENTR, the Council of European National TLD Registries. His role on the CENTR secretariat, and his representation of European country code managers in international fora, brought additional knowledge and expertise to ICANN as ICANN continues to strengthen its service to IANA customers, particularly TLD managers. Kim’s appointment continues to show ICANN’s commitment to serving a global Internet community.

Prior to his appointment at CENTR Kim held a number of appointments concerned with Domain and ISP management, including as Head of Web Services for iiNet, an Internet Access company. He was also on the board of the .au domain manager auDA from its founding through to 2005, and was responsible for commissioning and operating a key Australian Internet exchange point. Kim was also the Principal of Cynosure Innovation, an Internet consulting business.

Except where otherwise noted, all postings by Kim Davies on CircleID are licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Featured Blogs

How to Place Top-Level Domain Trust Anchors in the Root

The project to sign the DNS root zone with DNSSEC took an additional step toward completion yesterday with the last of the "root server" hosts switching to serving signed DNSSEC data. Now every DNS query to a root server can return DNSSEC-signed data, albeit the "deliberately unvalidatable" data prior to the final launch. Another key piece for a working signed root is the acceptance of trust anchors in the form of DS records from top-level domain operators. These trust anchors are used to form the chain of trust from the root zone to the TLD. more

Why DNS is Broken, in Plain English

At ICANN's meeting in Egypt last week, I had the opportunity to try and explain to various non-technical audiences why the Domain Name System (DNS) is vulnerable to attack, and why that is important, without needing a computer science degree to understand it. Here is the summary. more

Current Difficulties With Displaying Internationalized Top-Level Domains

Earlier this week, we inserted eleven new top-level domains in the DNS root zone. These represent the term "test" translated into ten languages, in ten different scripts (Chinese is represented in two different scripts, and Arabic script is used by two different languages). This blog post is not about that. (If you're interested about it, read our report on the delegations.) What I would like to talk about is some of the difficulties we face today in expressing scripts in a consistent way over the Internet... more

CENTR Statement on IDN Homograph Attacks

Recently a proof of concept attack was announced on the Internet that demonstrated how a web address could be constructed that looked in some web browsers identical to that of a well known website. This technique could be used to trick a user into going to a website that they did not plan on visiting, and possibly provide sensitive information to a third party. As a result of this demonstration, there has been a number of voices calling for web browsers to disable or remove support for IDNs by default. ...CENTR, a group of many of the world's domain registries - representing over 98% of domain registrations worldwide - believes such strong reactions are heavily detrimental... more