The DNSSEC Industry Coalition conducted its first face to face meeting on Friday, March 13, 2009 at Google’s Washington, DC office. Google’s fun filled meeting room was packed with organizations that share a keen interest in DNS Security through the implementation of DNSSEC. Organizations in attendance included U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Verizon, AT&T, Google, VeriSign, Network Solutions, CSC, Markmonitor, DynDNS, .SE, .BR, Shinkuro, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. (ISC), .ORG, The Public Interest Registry, Afilias Limited, Comcast, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NLNetLabs, Sparta, Secure64, and the Internet Society (ISOC).

The day consisted of 3 very lively presentations. I was honored to have Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf kick off the meeting with a keynote speech on the pressing need to sign the root during which he gave his nod of approval to the coalition’s efforts to foster wide spread adoption of DNSSEC. “What you are doing is very important,” said Vint in his speech to the Coalition. “Take a page from history—copy the success of Postel’s TCP facilitators group.” The Facilitators group was a group of like-minded individuals who worked together to create protocols for the Internet to function as we know it today. Wow…what big shoes to fill—I believe this is a great model to guide The DNSSEC Industry Coalition’s efforts in facilitating widespread DNSSEC adoption.

We were happy to have Staffan Hagnell from .SE and Demi Getschko from .BR share their experiences in deploying DNSSEC including surprises, highlights, and lessons learned. The information exchange was extremely beneficial and members took back some valuable best practices as member organizations evaluate and work towards their own DNSSEC initiatives.

Last but not least, Internet researcher Dan Kaminsky, well known for the discovery of the infamous DNS Bug, gave an enthusiastic presentation on the need for wide spread DNSSEC adoption to the Coalition meeting. Kaminsky pushed for the signing of the root and working towards a DNSSEC implementation that doesn’t cause the average tech to “run away screaming.”

The meeting itself had positive energy and vibes like a pep rally before the big game. The attendees left the meeting motivated to take on Vint’s challenge for DNSSEC (and in the words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard) to “make it so.”

There is a lot of work to be done! Stay tuned for developments from the DNSSEC Industry Coalition.

(Lauren Price is Chair of the DNSSEC Industry Coalition and Senior Product Marketing Manager of Public Interest Registry (PIR), the official manager of .ORG Top-Level Domain.)