ICANN appoints security chairman

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- the nonprofit group that oversees basic technical matters related to the Internet -- has appointed a chairman for its newly formed standing committee on security and stability.

Dr. Stephen Crocker will head the committee, to be known as the ICANN Security Committee, which will focus on the security of the Internet's naming and address allocation systems, ICANN said in a statement on Monday.

As part of its role, ICANN is responsible for ensuring the stability of the Internet's addressing system, Domain Name System (DNS). At the ICANN conference in November, some attendees stressed that ICANN's system is vulnerable to distributed denial-of-service attacks, in part because its server software uses a code base known as BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain).

The ICANN Security Committee was established to look into such issues. Its first task will be to advise ICANN's president on the group's proposed charter, ICANN said.

Crocker helped develop protocols for Arpanet, the original network that became the basis for the Internet, and organized the forerunner of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). He has been a program manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and has worked at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and The Aerospace Corporation, where he founded the Computer Sciences Laboratory, ICANN said.

Crocker, who got his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles, was also the co-founder and chief technical officer of CyberCash Inc. and was co-founder and president of telecommunication software company Longitude Systems, which was purchased by Vibrant Solutions Inc. last November, ICANN said.

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