DNS Security

DNSSEC Update from ICANN 42 in Dakar

While the global rollout of DNSSEC continues at the domain name registry level - with more than 25% of top-level domains now signed - the industry continues to focus on the problem of registrar, ISP and ultimately end-user adoption. At the ICANN meeting in Dakar in late October, engineers from some of the early-adopting registries gathered for their regular face-to-face discussion about how to break the "chicken or egg" problems of secure domain name deployment.

Taking the Anti-SOPA Message to the People

It was fascinating last week to read coverage of congressional hearings around the SOPA bill, or Stop Online Privacy Act. The bill has strong support from the Motion Picture Association of America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and big pharmaceutical companies. It's opposed by most technology and telecom companies, plus consumer advocate groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge.

Protecting Intellectual Property is Good; Mandatory DNS Filtering is Bad

It has been about six months since I got together with four of my friends from the DNS world and we co-authored a white paper which explains the technical problems with mandated DNS filtering. The legislation we were responding to was S. 968, also called the PROTECT-IP act, which was introduced this year in the U. S. Senate. By all accounts we can expect a similar U. S. House of Representatives bill soon, so we've written a letter to both the House and Senate, renewing and updating our concerns.

Hacking Away at the Internet’s Security

The front page story of the September 13 2011 issue of the International Herald Tribune said it all: "Iranian activists feel the chill as hacker taps into e-mails." The news story relates how a hacker has "sneaked into the computer systems of a security firm on the outskirts of Amsterdam" and then "created credentials that could allow someone to spy on Internet connections that appeared to be secure." According to this news report this incident punched a hole in an online security mechanism that is trusted by hundreds of millions of Internet users all over the network.

DNSSEC Takes Off in Wake of Root Zone Signing

The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is a suite of IETF-developed specifications designed to validate information provided by the Domain Name System (DNS). ... When the root zone was signed in June 2010, this acted as a catalyst for TLD operators to deploy DNSSEC on their side. We have seen a gradual but significant increase in signed TLDs since then. The map in this post shows the level of DNSSEC deployment in Europe.

Defense in Depth for DNSSEC Applications

At the time of this writing DNSSEC mostly does not work. This is not a bad thing - in fact it's expected... There is a significant last-mover advantage DNSSEC deployment (or IPv6 deployment) and that can't be helped. It's all in a good cause though - everybody knows we need this stuff and some farsighted contributors put a lot of money and other resources into DNSSEC years or decades ago to ensure that when the time comes the world will have a migration path. Sadly, this leaves current investors and application designers and developers wondering whether there's a market yet.

DNSSEC Baby Steps Reported at ICANN 41

The Internet is slowly beginning to adopt the new DNSSEC domain names standard, but significant challenges remain. That was the main takeaway from a four-hour workshop on the technology held during the recent ICANN 41 public meeting in Singapore, which heard from many domain registries, registrars and other infrastructure providers.

Six Key Issues About Operating a TLD Registry

Brand owners unfamiliar with the domain name system (DNS) are hearing that their first step in registering a top level domain (TLD) is to select a back-end TLD registry provider. The fear instilled in them is that if they don't act quickly, all available service providers will have reached their capacity. Given ICANN's tight and inflexible application submission schedule, brands don't want to be left at the starting gate.

DNSSEC Maintenance - Just Like Mowing the Lawn

DNSSEC is a hot topic. It's a technology newly unleashed on popular networking, which has led to countless articles and posts on the subject, including right here on CircleID. The way a lot of articles try to get your attention is to talk about a technology, like DNSSEC, in a way that makes the technology either seem really significant or really complicated. That is why a lot of articles about DNSSEC make it sound like something huge, complicated, and scary. But it's not.

Beyond Limitations and What Good It Would Do to ICANN to Operate from Abundance

The ICANN community is conservative. A considerable number of dedicated ICANN volunteers from various constituencies believe that ICANN should follow the unusual logic of limiting its revenues to the levels of its CURRENT estimates of expenditure. The Board, acting on the advise of the ICANN community brought down the ICANN transaction fee per domain name from 25 cents to 16 cents and in the case of numbers, for various reasons the Address Registry fees that it collects from the Regional Internet Registries have been historically kept at a negligibly low level.