Report from the Workshop and Prize on Root Causes and Mitigation of Name Collisions
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Independent Submission                                         M. Thomas
Request for Comments: 8023
Category: Informational                                        A. Mankin
ISSN: 2070-1721                                               Salesforce
                                                                L. Zhang
                                                                    UCLA
                                                           November 2016

                 Report from the Workshop and Prize on
             Root Causes and Mitigation of Name Collisions

Abstract

   This document provides context and a report on the workshop on "Root
   Causes and Mitigation of Name Collisions", which took place in
   London, United Kingdom, from March 8 to 10, 2014.  The main goal of
   the workshop was to foster a discussion on the causes and potential
   mitigations of domain name collisions.  This report provides a small
   amount of background and context; then, it provides a summary of the
   workshop's discussions.

Status of This Memo

   This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
   published for informational purposes.

   This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other
   RFC stream.  The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at
   its discretion and makes no statement about its value for
   implementation or deployment.  Documents approved for publication by
   the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet
   Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841.

   Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
   and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
   http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8023.

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RFC 8023                Name Collisions Workshop           November 2016

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction ....................................................2
   2. Background and Context ..........................................4
      2.1. Brief Update ...............................................6
   3. Workshop Structure ..............................................7
      3.1. Research Findings ..........................................8
      3.2. System Analysis ............................................9
      3.3. Frameworks: Modeling, Analysis, and  Mitigation ............9
      3.4. Conclusions and Next Steps ................................11
   4. Security Considerations ........................................11
   5. Informative References .........................................12
   Appendix A. Program Committee .....................................16
   Appendix B. Workshop Material .....................................16
   Appendix C. Workshop Participants .................................17
   Acknowledgments ...................................................17
   Authors' Addresses ................................................17

1.  Introduction

   It has been well known within the Internet research and engineering
   community that many installed systems in the Internet query the
   domain name system (DNS) root for names under a wide range of top-
   level domains (TLDs).  Many of these TLDs are not delegated, which
   results in a response indicating that the name queried does not exist
   (commonly called an NXDOMAIN response [RFC7719]).  In the Internet
   Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) community, it was
   observed as early as November 2010 by the Security and Stability
   Advisory Committee (SSAC) report [SAC045] that the addition of new
   TLDs in the DNS root could result in so-called name collisions for
   names used in environments other than the global Internet.  Some
   installed systems, following established (albeit not vetted)
   operational practices, generate queries to the global DNS with name
   suffixes that, under seemingly reasonable assumptions at the time the
   systems were designed or configured, were not expected to be
   delegated as TLDs.  Many of these installed systems depend explicitly

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RFC 8023                Name Collisions Workshop           November 2016

   or implicitly on the indication from the global DNS that the domain
   name suffix does not exist.  After a new TLD is delegated, the global
   DNS may give a different response to the query involving the TLD than
   it did prior to the TLD's delegation.