News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia from the internet [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia fr... by varenc on Thursday March 03, 2022 @01:05PM (#30544418)
> The only thing that could be done, in principle, by ICANN and EU/US service providers is to block out all content coming in or out of Russia

I don't think this is true. The root DNS servers ICANN runs could stop handling requests for anything on the .ru/.su Russian TLDs. Though Russia runs the .ru servers internally, from ripn.net, there's still reliance on the root servers to point there. This would break Russian internal access to their own services.

If you run `dig +trace government.ru` you can see your first query is to the various "*.root-servers.net" name servers. When I did this my queries went like this:

   A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET -> B.DNS.RIPN.NET -> NS2.GOV.RU
That first step, contacting the centralized root servers, is where ICANN could have killed .ru domain lookups. (also my knowledge of DNS is shaky, so someone correct me if I'm wrong)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia fr... by sudosysgen on Thursday March 03, 2022 @02:18PM (#30545431)
Russian ISP DNS servers would just do whatever is necessary to make it work, up to not respecting ICANN
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia fr... by simiones on Friday March 04, 2022 @07:32AM (#30553796)
You're right that they would have to take some action, but nothing would stop Russian ISPs from taking over *.root-servers.net, or responding with authoritative responses before reaching those.

Now, to be fair, significant, though temporary, damage could be done to them from the outside (who knows how many Russian systems have their DNS configured to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8, for example).

[ Parent | on HN ]