Cybersecurity

Mozilla Implements TLD Whitelist for Firefox in Response to IDN Homographs Spoofing

Mozilla Foundation has announced changes to Firefox concerning Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) to deal with homograph spoofing attacks. According to the organization, "Mozilla Foundation products now only display IDNs in a whitelist of TLDs, which have policies stating what characters are permitted, and procedures for making sure that no homographic domains are registered to two different entities." Following is a statement explaining the current status of the Mozilla changes to Firefox regarding IDN... more

Abusive Anti-Anti-Spam Scheme a Dreadful Strategy

A new company called Blue Security purports to have an innovative approach to getting rid of spam. I don't think much of it. As I said to an Associated Press reporter: "It's the worst kind of vigilante approach," said John Levine, a board member with the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "Deliberate attacks against people's Web sites are illegal." more

A Balkanized Internet Future?

Joi Ito has an important post [also featured on CircleID] on how the internet is in danger of becoming balkanized into separate "internets". He's not the only person who's concerned. Greg Walton worries about Regime Change on the Internet. My friend Tim Wu, a law professor specializing in international trade and intellectual property, has written an article for Slate: The Filtered Future: China's bid to divide the Internet... more

Signposts in Cyberspace: An NRC Report on the DNS and Internet Navigation

In light of the recent decision by the United States government to "maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file" and ICANN's recent decisions to add more gTLDs (including .xxx), and to renew VeriSign as the .net registry, readers may be interested in the just-published report of the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Signposts in Cyberspace: The Domain Name System and Internet Navigation. ...a comprehensive policy-oriented examination of the Domain Name System in the broader context of Internet navigation. more

The US Department of Commerce, the DNS Root, and ICANN

The recent announcement in eWeek titled "Feds Won't Let Go of Internet DNS" (slashdotted here) has some major internet policy implications. The short, careful wording appears to be more of a threat to ICANN than a power grab. In short, the US Department of Commerce's (DOC) National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that it was not going to stop overseeing ICANN's changes to the DNS root. ...Of course, they have done next to nothing to support DNSSEC or other proposal for securing the DNS, but it sounds reassuring. The last sentence shows that the Bush administration shares the Clinton administration's lack of understanding of how the internet should evolve... more

U.S. Government to Retain Oversight of the Internet’s Root Servers

The U.S. government has announced today that it will indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet's root servers, ignoring pervious calls by some countries to turn the function over to an international body. more

Twenty Myths and Truths About IPv6 and the US IPv6 Transition

After hearing over 350 presentations on IPv6 from IPv6-related events in the US (seven of them), China, Spain, Japan, and Australia, and having had over 3,000 discussions about IPv6 with over a thousand well-informed people in the IPv6 community, I have come to the conclusion that all parties, particularly the press, have done a terrible job of informing people about the bigger picture of IPv6, over the last decade, and that we need to achieve a new consensus that doesn't include so much common wisdom that is simply mythical. There are many others in a position to do this exercise better than I can, and I invite them to make a better list than mine, which follows. more

There Is No “Spam Problem”

This month I thought I could feel smug, deploying Postfix, with greylisting (Postgrey), and the Spamhaus block list (SBL-XBL) has reduced the volume of unsolicited bulk commercial email one of our servers was delivering to our clients by 98.99%. Alas greylisting is a flawed remedy, it merely requires the spambots to act more like email servers and it will fail, and eventually they will... more

Some Notes on the .XXX Top-Level Domain

Yesterday the ICANN board discussed and approved ICANN staff to enter into negotiations with ICM Registry, Inc. for the .XXX Top Level Domain (TLD). I'm sure there will be a longer more complete presentation from ICANN later about this, but as an individual board member I thought I'd post a quick note before people got carried away with speculation based on a lack of information. more

Phishing: An Interesting Twist on a Common Scam

After Two Security Assessments I Must Be Secure, Right? Imagine you are the CIO of a national financial institution and you've recently deployed a state of the art online transaction service for your customers. To make sure your company's network perimeter is secure, you executed two external security assessments and penetration tests. When the final report came in, your company was given a clean bill of health. At first, you felt relieved, and confident in your security measures. Shortly thereafter, your relief turned to concern. ...Given you're skepticism, you decide to get one more opinion. ...And the results were less than pleasing. more