The DNSSEC Industry Coalition comprised of 20 organizations streamlining the rollout of DNSSEC worldwide, gathered on Friday, March 13, 2009, to share best practices in deployment and meet the urgent challenge to secure the Internet’s domain name system (DNS). Approximately 50 people attended the meeting and 3 presentations were scheduled with a lively Q&A following. Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, Vint Cerf, provided a keynote speech on the pressing need to sign the root zone and the importance of efforts to implement DNSSEC.

“The Internet needs this technology and it needs it now,” said Vint Cerf during his speech to the Coalition about their collaborative efforts and goals of widespread adoption of DNSSEC. “As a group you can help make the point to policy makers that this is important.”
Presentations were given by representatives from .SE (the Internet Infrastructure Foundation) and Registro.br, the registry operators for the .se and .br top level domains respectively, on their successful implementation of Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC). They also offered advice and insight into their respective launches of the technical upgrade. Later in the day there was a presentation by Internet researcher Dan Kaminsky, famous for identifying and making public a gaping hole in DNS infrastructure, on his support of implementing DNSSEC from the security community perspective and his efforts to help further full industry implementation.

“The common cause of security issues related to the DNS is our inability to fix them in a way that scales effectively—therefore, we need DNSSEC,” said Dan Kaminsky during his presentation followed by animated discussion. “However, DNSSEC, like all authoritative-server modifying solutions, needs the root signed.”

The meeting included companies from various sectors of the Internet industry and representatives of the DNSSEC Industry Coalition. Led by the DNSSEC Industry Coalition Chair and Sr. Product Marketing Manager for .ORG, The Public Interest Registry, Lauren Price, it is believed that the informal setting and relaxed, interactive atmosphere contributed to the meeting’s success of bringing together like-minded individuals to discuss areas and particulars involved in widespread DNSSEC adoption.

About Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC)

With DNSSEC, Internet users know that their Internet-based communications such as web site visits and email correspondence actually connect to the parties they intend to reach. DNSSEC thwarts attacks such as pharming, cache poisoning, and DNS redirection that have been used to commit fraud, distribute malware, or steal personal or confidential information. For more information on DNSSEC, please visit http://www.dnssec-deployment.org.

About the DNSSEC Industry Coalition

The DNSSEC Industry Coalition is a global group of registries and industry experts whose mission is to work collaboratively to facilitate adoption of Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and streamline the implementations across Domain Name Registries. Members work together to establish a consistent set of tools and applications, shared best practices, specifications and shared nomenclature. DNSSEC Industry Coalition members include both generic Top-Level Domain and country code Top-Level Domain registries along with industry and educational experts of the Domain Name System. The Coalition was founded by .ORG, The Public Interest Registry in August 2008.