News

On 26 January 2021 EDRi’s annual PrivacyCamp event was organised online for the first time. Over six hours, in three parallel tracks, activists and officials discussed hot privacy topics. CENTR participated in a multi-disciplinary panel on wiring digital justice.

CENTR, the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries and eco, the Association of the Internet Industry are delighted to invite you to a joint public webinar on DNS over HTTPS. The webinar will take place on 9 February 2021 at 4pm CET.

With Cisco engineer Alissa Cooper having decided not to run for another term as IETF Chair, the NomCom just has announced that Lars Eggert will be her successor. Eggert is a German living in Finland, working for US-based storage solution provider NetApp. But what will he bring to the table?

The 2021 ICANN Nominating Committee (NomCom) is looking to fill nine positions this year.

Over the last few weeks we have published a series of blogposts covering the IETF109 meeting, which we have brought together into one final report, together with two additional updates from the meeting. This report can be found here.

The Adaptive DNS Discovery (ADD) working group (WG) at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been trying to catch up with the deployment of encrypted DNS and met six times last year. Its goal is to provide standardised means of discovering which encrypted options are available to various network users, and a means for those same users to select the option most appropriate for their intended use. The work entails manoeuvering between technical tasks and policy choices that other WGs, such as the DNS Operations (DNSOP) WG were reluctant to pick up.

Not one, not two, but three new protocols are offering internet transport layer options for the Domain Name System (DNS). We must not lose sight of the dernier cri (last shout) though. Here is a quick look at the catalogue of options and opinions on DNS over TLS (DoT), DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over Quic (DoQ).

The ongoing search for a new IETF Chair offers the community a possibility to look into diversity issues and choose a candidate sponsored by one of the newer participants in the standardisation process. It is unfortunate that the most plausible candidate from the standpoint of diversity, is sponsored by Chinese vendor Huawei, who is currently locked in a trade war with the US.

The DNS Working Group of the IETF is continuing to expand the DNS code base with both new features and enhancements to previous features. In the latest session, a proposal on private space in the DNS with two letter codes received mixed comments, while the policy-heavy work on the operational fall-out of DoH is still not welcome.

Last month, an Austrian media report kicked up a storm by suggesting that the Council of the European Union was drafting a resolution to prohibit the use of end-to-end encrypted communication. This was quickly corrected: the draft resolution, in fact, affirms the previous position of previous EU policy documents that recognise the importance of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in providing secure and private communication.