[council] what about a process to review/evaluate whether SSAC recommendations warrant action by the GNSO

["Mike O'Connor" <mike@xxxxxxxxxx>]

dear all,

i would like to introduce a gap-closing proposal for the GNSO -- namely, to 
take a hard look at SSAC reports and determine whether any of their 
recommendations bear on GNSO Consensus Policy.

this gap between what the SSAC says and the GNSO does has been an issue for me 
for quite some time, and i think one easy way to close it would be to routinely 
take up each SSAC report and make that determination.  there would likely be 
cases where we review the reports among the stakeholder groups and conclude 
that:

-- there are NO recommendations that require PDPs
-- there ARE recommendations that require PDPs, or
-- there are recommendations that we would like to know more about before we 
decided whether a PDP is in order.  

i'll give an example of the reason why this is on my mind.  in 2005 the SSAC 
produced an extensive report that addressed the issue of domain-name hijacking. 
 in 2011, six years later, the members of the IRTP-B working group stumbled 
across the following observation in that ancient report and realized that it 
would be a good idea

Collect emergency contact information from registrants, registrars, and 
resellers for parties who are suited to assist in responding to an urgent 
restoration of domain name incident. Define escalation processes (emergency 
procedures) that all parties agree can be instituted in events where emergency 
contacts are not available.

it took six years for that very common-sense idea to find it's way into 
Consensus Policy.  and it probably took another year or two to implement.  and 
it was all practically by accident.  

what if we:

-- discuss this "formally review SSAC reports" idea with our stakeholders and 
on the Council list for a while

-- put an agenda item on our next call to share what we've heard and test a way 
forward

-- get started, presuming nobody thinks this is a horrible idea

i've attached the recommendations from the three (count 'em, three) SSAC 
reports that were released in Buenos Aires.  just to give you an idea of the 
substantive reports that the SSAC is producing.  i think it would be really 
helpful to run these through a process to decide which, if any, of these 
recommendations warrant action via PDP.  there are plenty more SSAC reports to 
review in the backlog.

thanks,

mikey




SAC061:  SSAC Comment on ICANN’s Initial Report from the Expert Working Group 
on gTLD Directory Services

http://www.icann.org/en/groups/ssac/documents/sac-061-en.pdf

Recommendation 1: SSAC reiterates its recommendation from SAC055: The ICANN 
Board should explicitly defer any other activity (within ICANN’s remit) 
directed at finding a ‘solution’ to ‘the WHOIS problem’ until the registration 
data policy has been developed and accepted in the community. The EWG should 
clearly state its proposal for the purpose of registration data, and focus on 
policy issues over specific implementations.

Recommendation 2: The ICANN Board should ensure that a formal security risk 
assessment of the registration data policy be conducted as an input into the 
Policy Development Process.

Recommendation 3: SSAC recommends that the EWG state more clearly its positions 
on the following questions of data availability:

A. Why is a change to public access justified?
This explanation should describe the potential impact upon ordinary Internet 
users and casual or occasional users of the directory service.

B. Does the EWG believe that access to data currently accessible in generic Top 
Level Domain (gTLD) WHOIS output should become restricted?
If so, what fields and to what extent exactly? Under the EWG proposal, queries 
from non- authenticated requestors would return only “public data available to 
anyone, for

C. Should all gTLD registries be required to provision their contact data into 
the Aggregated Registration Data Service (ARDS)?  
There may be jurisdictions that prohibit by law the export of personally 
identifiable information outside the jurisdiction. If so, the ARDS may not be a 
viable way to deliver data accuracy and compliance across all gTLDs.

D. Does the EWG propose more types of sensitive registration data be 
provisioned into ARDS than are found in current gTLD WHOIS output? 

Recommendation 4: The SSAC suggests that the EWG address this recommendation 
from SAC058: “SSAC Report on Domain Name Registration Data Validation”3:
As the ICANN community discusses validating contact information, the SSAC 
recommends that the following meta-questions regarding the costs and benefits 
of registration data validation should be answered:

• What data elements need to be added or validated to comply with requirements 
or expectations of different stakeholders?
• Is additional registration processing overhead and delay an acceptable cost 
for improving accuracy and quality of registration data?
• Is higher cost an acceptable outcome for improving accuracy and quality?
• Would accuracy improve if the registration process were to provide natural 
persons with privacy protection upon completion of multi-factored validation?


SAC062:  SSAC Advisory Concerning the Mitigation of Name Collision Risk

http://www.icann.org/en/groups/ssac/documents/sac-062-en.pdf

Recommendation 1: ICANN should work with the wider Internet community, 
including at least the IAB and the IETF, to identify (1) what strings are 
appropriate to reserve for private namespace use and (2) what type of private 
namespace use is appropriate (i.e., at the TLD level only or at any additional 
lower level).

Recommendation 2: ICANN should explicitly consider the following questions 
regarding trial delegation and clearly articulate what choices have been made 
and why as part of its decision as to whether or not to delegate any TLD on a 
trial basis:

-- Purpose of the trial: What type of trial is to be conducted? What data are 
to be collected?

-- Operation of the trial: Should ICANN (or a designated agent) operate the 
trial or should the applicant operate it?

-- Emergency Rollback: What are the emergency rollback decision and execution 
procedures for any delegation in the root, and have the root zone partners 
exercised these capabilities?

-- Termination of the trial: What are the criteria for terminating the trial 
(both normal and emergency criteria)? What is to be done with the data 
collected? Who makes the decision on what the next step in the delegation 
process is?

Recommendation 3: ICANN should explicitly consider under what circumstances 
un-delegation of a TLD is the appropriate mitigation for a security or 
stability issue. In the case where a TLD has an established namespace, ICANN 
should clearly identify why the risk and harm of the TLD remaining in the root 
zone is greater than the risk and harm of removing a viable and in-use 
namespace from the DNS. Finally, ICANN should work in consultation with the 
community, in particular the root zone management partners, to create 
additional processes or update existing processes to accommodate the potential 
need for rapid reversal of the delegation of a TLD.

SAC063:  SSAC Advisory on DNSSEC Key Rollover in the Root Zone

http://www.icann.org/en/groups/ssac/documents/sac-063-en.pdf

Recommendations:

Recommendation 1: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 
staff, in coordination with the other Root Zone Management Partners (United 
States Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information 
Administration (NTIA), and Verisign), should immediately undertake a 
significant, worldwide communications effort to publicize the root zone KSK 
rollover motivation and process as widely as possible.
        
Recommendation 2: ICANN staff should lead, coordinate, or otherwise encourage 
the creation of a collaborative, representative testbed for the purpose of 
analyzing behaviors of various validating resolver implementations, their 
versions, and their network environments (e.g., middle boxes) that may affect 
or be affected by a root KSK rollover, such that potential problem areas can be 
identified, communicated, and addressed.

Recommendation 3: ICANN staff should lead, coordinate, or otherwise encourage 
the creation of clear and objective metrics for acceptable levels of “breakage” 
resulting from a key rollover.

Recommendation 4: ICANN staff should lead, coordinate, or otherwise encourage 
the development of rollback procedures to be executed when a rollover has 
affected operational stability beyond a reasonable boundary.

Recommendation 5: ICANN staff should lead, coordinate, or otherwise encourage 
the collection of as much information as possible about the impact of a KSK 
rollover to provide input to planning for future rollovers.

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