Posts Tagged ‘idn’

Tina Dam: Next Generation Internet Users?

As we (at ICANN staff) have been preparing for the Fast Track launch, for tomorrow, it was suggested to me that I write a blog post about it. I could have written about all the hard work, the long hours, the aggressive testing of the online system, keeping it simple and yet flexible for all […]

Internationalization

InternationalFlags_Small.jpgRecently, we were thinking about purchasing new domain names for Imperva’s web site in languages other than English. This was a trigger for me to do some reading on ICANN’s International Domain Names (IDNs). Although I was already familiar with the general IDN concept, I knew that it is an evolving standard and I wanted to go back and re-examine the potential impacts on our WAF product. I didn’t find anything too interesting, but I did come to understand that there are some major security implications associated with this standard.  More importantly, no one has yet taken real responsibly for dealing with them.

But before I get into that, here’s a crash course in IDNs for those of you who are not familiar with the concept:

1. International domain names are becoming more and more available as more registrars and ISPs are implementing the IDN standard, which allows registering domain names that include non-ASCII characters.