[ NNSquad ] ICANN helps China censor Internet. Root servers leak censored DNS replies outside Great Firewall

[Joe Baptista <baptista@publicroot.org>]

I came across a very interesting article today.

http://bit.ly/bZbkB1

If the claims made in this article are correct then this issue is significant and raises some serious questions concerning the conduct of ICANN the U.S. government contractor for the management of the root servers.

First this is a serious violation of RFC 2826 "IAB Technical Comment on the Unique DNS Root". RFC 2826 requires that global networks like the Internet have a globally unique public name space. That means you provide the same answers to a user in China as you do for a user in the USA or anywhere else in the world. In the case of facebook.com a root server should only publish the addresses of the .com name servers and not be authoritative for the domain itself.

There are two issues here that immediately come to mind. The first is technical. And as has been reported users were given incorrect answers. The second issue is one of security and user privacy. Users who were given incorrect DNS information for facebook.com were probably redirected to a proxy site where their information could have been collected. Thats a major security issue.

regards
joe baptista