This Sunday, March 22, 2015, the second Registration Operations Workshop (ROW) will be taking place at the Fairmont Dallas hotel from 12:30 – 4:30 pm CDT. Discussion will include extensions to EPP, new encryption initiatives and also suggestions for ways to further automate DNS interactions between registries, registrars and DNS operators, including a need to do this for DNSSEC.

REMOTE PARTICIPATION is possible. All you need to do complete the form at www.regiops.net. If you are in Dallas for IETF 92, this ROW event happens on the Sunday before IETF 92 and is open to all who can get there. The ROW event is not affiliated with the IETF, but the ROW organizers did work with the IETF to use some meeting space at the same venue. As stated on the ROW site:

The Registration Operations Workshop (ROW) was conceived as an informal industry conference that would provide a forum for discussion of the technical aspects of registration operations in the domain name ecosystem.

This meeting is open to all interested industry members, including domain name registrars, gTLDs, ccTLDs, registries, resellers, and second level domain registries.

Back in February, Scott Hollenbeck wrote here on CircleID about the ROW call for participation and earlier this week I wrote on the Deploy360 blog about the current status of the event.

Beyond the talk of extensions to the EPP protocol used for communication between registrars, registries and DNS operators, there are two topics that I think will be of great interest to many:

• Richard Barnes of Mozilla will be talking about the the Let’s Encrypt initiative and the Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol.
• Olafur Gudmundsson of CloudFlare and Jacques Latour of CIRA will discuss a proposal for a new registry access model to update delegation information.

The Let’s Encrypt / ACME discussion should be interesting as far as improving the overall security of the Internet. Getting more encryption happening everywhere is something I would very much like to see!

The second topic is of particular interest to those such as myself who want to accelerate the deployment of DNSSEC, given that what is being proposed may help avoid situations such as the HBO Now DNSSEC misconfiguration issue earlier this month. Olafur Gudmundsson has been talking about the challenges in the current DNS registration model for a bit now, and this ROW session should represent a continued evolution of that discussion. It’s a problem we definitely need to fix!

To ensure there is adequate space, the organizers are asking everyone interested to register on the ROW website. If you want to attend remotely, you also need to register to be sent the remote participation info.

I’ll be one of those participating remotely and I’m looking forward to hearing the presentations and participating in the discussions. If you’d like to join in, please do!