ICANN’s ITHI Project

ITHI, or Identifier Technologies Health Indicators is an ICANN initiative to “measure” the “health” of the “identifiers” that “ICANN helps coordinate”. This is directly linked to one of the priorities in ICANN Strategic Plan for 2016-2020: “Foster and coordinate a healthy, secure, stable, and resilient identifier ecosystem.”

Diagram showing progress from data source to ITHI analysis to publication via ODI

The goal of the ITHI project is to produce a set of indicators that will be measured and tracked over time that will help determine if the set of identifiers is overall doing better or worse. This is a long term project, expected to run for many years. The focus of the ITHI project is strictly technical. Our role is to define metrics and perform measurements in important problem areas, and to assess values and trends over time. We will leave interpretation and reaction to others.

We rely on various data sources and place a great emphasis on protecting the privacy of these sources. Instead of collecting the raw data, we let these sources extract basic statistics, devoid of personal identifiers and other sensitive information. Our processing tools are available as open source, and the data are published through the Open Data Initiative.

Eight metrics cover the currently identified problem areas:

Metric NameData Source
M1: inaccuracy of Whois Data ICANN compliance dept.
M2: Domain Name Abuse ICANN’s DAAR Project
M3: DNS Root Traffic Analysis Scans of DNS root traffic
M4: DNS Recursive Server Analysis Summaries of recursive resolvers traffic
M5: Recursive Resolver Integrity APNIC
M6: IANA registries for DNS parameters Scan of recursive resolvers traffic
M7: DNSSEC Deployment. Snapshots of DNS root zone
M8: DNS Authoritative Servers Analysis Scans of authoritative servers traffic

The project is managed by Alain Durand at ICANN and by Christian Huitema at Private Octopus Inc, under contract with ICANN. This initial web site is provided by Private Octopus Inc. These pages will soon be published through ICANN's web site.