Mutual Internet
Practices Asssoc.

Home
 About Scope
Current
Contact
 

Scope
   
 

 

How can organizations:

  

How can the Internet:
  • Safely separate useful mail from spam and other problematic email?
  
  • Develop community assessment of operation impact from proposals?
  • Reliably contact responsive network administrators at other organizations?
 
  • Insulate critical traffic against DOS attack?
  • Protect control flows between providers?
  
  • Protect core DNS traffic?

 

Safe Internet Practises

MIPA activities divide into four efforts:

Agreement

 — Developing best practices ensuring safe service interoperability

Technology

 — Identifying the means to achieve these practices, assessing their impact, and ensuring their development and standardization

Assurance

 — Monitoring, reporting and assisting members in their use of the practice

Education

 — Offering symposia, workshops, literature and press contacts
   

Example
Projects

 

Formulate anti-spam best practices for providers

Spam is crippling email. So far no mechanism has been shown to have long-term, large-scale effects at reducing global spam. Techniques for combating spam divide between control at the source and control at the destination. MIPA will produce a set of recommendations for spam detection and control among its members. It will revise the recommendations as the community gains more insight to the problem.

MIPA will start with basic, useful steps. For example, members can develop and use:

  • Define a database of responsive abuse desk contacts
  • Assess the operational and administrative impact for various anti-spam proposals
  • Define a set of best practices for preventing and responding to the onslaught of spam
  • Develop a registry of operators conforming to particular anti-spam procedures

A good starting point for these efforts is to identify informal practices already in use, and develop them into mechanisms that can scale for more general, long-term use.
 

Create a network of organizations adhering to anti-spam best practices

Some spam control techniques rely on assessing peer service organizations. When an organization adheres to a set of best practices, and is accountable for their use, it is possible to treat email originating from them with less suspicion. This translates into a significant reduction of anti-spam resources by the receiving provider. MIPA will create an informal network of cooperating services. Over time this network may become a formal accreditation mechanism.
 

Develop a protected DNS core

The Domain Name Service has been a target of distributed denial of service attacks, flooding critical servers and threatening to prevent servicing of legitimate queries. A closed, virtual "backbone" among DNS servers is not vulnerable to such attacks. MIPA will create an informal network of cooperating DNS servers that participate in this protected, virtual DNS backbone.
 
Comments concerning this site should be sent to: webmaster@mipassoc.org