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Attendees at the public ICANN meeting in Brussels today heard from over two dozen companies that have implemented or are planning to support DNSSEC, the next-generation standard protocol for secured domain names. It is clearer than ever before that DNSSEC is becoming a reality. more
Are you ready? Are your systems prepared so that DNS will keep functioning for your networks? One week from today, on Thursday, October 11, 2018, at 16:00 UTC ICANN will change the cryptographic key that is at the center of the DNS security system - what we call DNSSEC. The current key has been in place since July 15, 2010. This is a long-planned replacement. more
In light of increasing reports of malicious activity targeting the DNS infrastructure, ICANN is calling for the full deployment of the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across all unsecured domain names. more
The deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) for the root zone got an official start today with its public signing for the first time. DNSSEC for the root zone is a joint effort between ICANN and VeriSign, with support from the U.S. Department of Commerce to improve security of the Internet's naming infrastructure. Kim Davies, ICANN's Manager of Root Zone Services, says: "What happened today was the deliberately un-validatable root zone started being published on l.root-servers.net. It is anticipated this will be rolled out across the other root servers over the coming months. This phase is designed to identify any issues with the larger DNS response sizes associated with DNSSEC data." more
Geoff Huston's recent post about the rise of DNS amplification attacks offers excellent perspective on the issue. Major incidents like the Spamhaus attack Geoff mentions at the beginning of his post make headlines, but even small attacks create noticeable floods of traffic. These attacks are easy to launch and effective even with relatively modest resources and we see evidence they're occurring regularly. Although DNS servers are not usually the target of these attacks the increase in traffic and larger response sizes typically stress DNS infrastructure and require attention from operation teams. more
What is the responsibility of the DNS? Should the DNS be responsible for policing traffic across its infrastructure? Should the blocking and blacklisting of names or throttling of query packets be the responsibility of the DNS? From experience I know my opening paragraph has started passionate debates in more than one section of this globe. We at CommunityDNS have found ourselves right in the middle of such heated debates. "Oh YES you will!", "Oh NO you will not!" more
Unlike most new IETF standards, DNS over HTTPS has been a magnet for controversy since the DoH working group was chartered on 2017. The proposed standard was intended to improve the performance of address resolutions while also improving their privacy and integrity, but it's unclear that it accomplishes these goals. On the performance front, testing indicates DoH is faster than one of the alternatives, DNS over TLS (DoT). more
The North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) is now quite an institution for the Internet, particularly in the North American Internet community. It was an offshoot of the Regional Techs meetings, which were part of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) framework of the late 80s and early 90s. NANOG has thrived since then and is certainly one of the major network operational forums in today's Internet – if not the preeminent forum for network operators for the entire Internet. more
The Edgemoor Research Institute (ERI) and Taiwan's .TW Registry (TWNIC) have announced a three-year strategic partnership to enhance Domain Name System (DNS) data management and internet security. The collaboration focuses on joint research, data sharing, and capacity building, aiming to strengthen global internet infrastructure and governance. more
So we finally have a signed root zone. Now when is someone going to answer the question I first asked over five years ago and have still not had an answer to: How do the domain name owner's keys get into the TLD? Before we have a system people can use there have to be technical standards, validation criteria and a business model. Where are they? more
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee is investigating Google's plans to implement DNS over HTTPS (DoH) in Chrome according to a report by the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. more
In 2021, we discussed a potential future shift from established public-key algorithms to so-called "post-quantum" algorithms, which may help protect sensitive information after the advent of quantum computers. We also shared some of our initial research on how to apply these algorithms to the Domain Name System Security Extensions, or DNSSEC. In the time since that blog post, we've continued to explore ways to address the potential operational impact of post-quantum algorithms on DNSSEC, while also closely tracking industry research and advances in this area. more
When an outage affects a component of the internet infrastructure, there can often be downstream ripple effects affecting other components or services, either directly or indirectly. We would like to share our observations of this impact in the case of two recent such outages, measured at various levels of the DNS hierarchy, and discuss the resultant increase in query volume due to the behavior of recursive resolvers. more
The Internet Governance Project has unearthed a consultancy report to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that makes it clear that the issue of root signing and DNSSEC key management has been recognized as a political issue within the US government for long time. more
DNSSEC is a mechanism where clients can verify the authenticity of the answers they receive from servers. There are two sides here. The server must supply signed answers, and the client must verify the signatures on those answers. The validation/verification side is widely implemented, but there are very few signed zones... However, if no one signs their zones, those validating resolvers don't have many signatures to check. more