Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino
A Ukrainian government official on Monday asked the nonprofit organization that oversees the Internet Domain Name System (DNS) to shut down DNS root servers in Russia and revoke Russian domains such as .ru, .рф and .su. The letter to ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has been posted here and ICANN has confirmed that it has received the letter.
Several internet experts say it would be a bad idea to grant Ukraine’s request. Executive Director Bill Woodcock of Packet Clearing House, an international non-profit organization that provides operational support and security to Internet exchange points and the core domain name system, wrote a Twitter thread called it “a great question on the part of Ukraine. As a critical infrastructure operator, I tend to say no, regardless of my sympathy.”
Sent days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the letter said that Russia’s “horrific crimes have been made possible mainly by the Russian propaganda machine that uses websites that constantly spread disinformation, incite hate, promote violence and hide the truth about the war in Ukraine.” IT infrastructure has suffered numerous attacks from the Russian side, hampering the ability of citizens and governments to communicate.”
The letter asked California-based ICANN to “permanently or temporarily revoke the ‘.ru’, ‘.рф’ and ‘.su’ domains”. This list is not exhaustive and may include other domains that are issued in the Russian Federation.” Then, the letter asked ICANN to “help revoke SSL certificates for the above domains” and “shut down DNS root servers” in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. ICANN has previously explained that “root servers respond to DNS lookups made by DNS resolvers typically operated by Internet service providers.”
The letter was sent by Mykhailo Fedorov, the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation, to Göran Marby, CEO of ICANN. “Apart from these measures, I will send a separate request to RIPE NCC requesting that it revoke the right to use all IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of all Russian members of RIPE NCC (LIRs-Local Internet Registries) and DNS root servers. that it works,” Fedorov wrote. RIPE NCC (Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre) is the regional internet registry.
Cutoff would make sites inaccessible and reduce security
The text of Fedorov’s letter was also emailed by Andrii Nabok, Ukraine’s representative to ICANN’s government advisory committee, to Marby and other people at ICANN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the Number Resource Organization (NRO). ), and the United Nations. Woodcock posted the full text of the email on Pastebin Monday.
Woodcock wrote that Ukraine’s request to remove Russian top-level domains from the root zone would make Russian websites and email “unreachable from outside Russia, and also unreachable for some within Russia, depending on [on] how their ISPs and recursive resolvers are configured.” Ukraine’s request to shut down the root name servers in Russia “would make connectivity sloppy for many users in Russia, but mostly for commoners, not government or military users” He added, writing that Ukraine’s request to “revoke IP address delegations to Russian networks… would break the RPSL and RPKI security protecting their routing.”
“Together, these three actions would make Russian civilian internet users much more vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, such as those used to compromise banking information and website passwords,” he wrote. Woodcock explained that the actions would have “little to no effect on the Russian government or military”, pointing out that what Ukraine is asking “is precisely the attack that the Russians carried out last July, which means that their defenses are probably optimally ready at this point.”
Ukraine’s letter to ICANN stated that the requested “measures will help users search for reliable information in alternative domain zones, thereby preventing propaganda and disinformation.”
But Woodcock claimed Ukraine’s short-term request is a bad plan “because it would cut off the Russian man-on-the-street from international news and perspectives, leaving them alone with what the Russian government wants to tell them.” and that it is a bad plan in the long run, because it would “set the precedent for small industry associations in Los Angeles and Amsterdam to arbitrate international conflicts and tamper with the supposedly sovereign country code top-level domains of countries. And if if If that happened, many more countries than just China and Russia would secede from the common consensus internet that allows us to talk to each other.”
