DNS

Taking a Closer Look at the Recent DDoS Attacks and What it Means for the DNS

The recent attacks on the DNS infrastructure operated by Dyn in October 2016 have generated a lot of comment in recent days. Indeed, it's not often that the DNS itself has been prominent in the mainstream of news commentary, and in some ways, this DNS DDOS prominence is for all the wrong reasons! I'd like to speculate a bit on what this attack means for the DNS and what we could do to mitigate the recurrence of such attacks.

Trust Isn’t Easy: Drawing an Agenda from Friday’s DDoS Attack and the Internet of Things

Last week, millions of infected devices directed Internet traffic to DNS service provider Dyn, resulting in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that took down major websites including Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, and more. In a recent blog post, security expert Bruce Schneier argued that "someone has been probing the defences of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet". This attack seems to be part of that trend. This disruption begs the question: Can we trust the Internet?

How Did We Get Here? A Look Back at the History of IANA

October 2016 marks a milestone in the story of the Internet. At the start of the month, the United States Government let its residual oversight arrangements with ICANN over the operation of the IANA lapse. No single government now has a unique relationship with the governance of the protocol elements of the Internet, and it is now in the hands of a community of interested parties in a so-called Multi-Stakeholder framework. This is a unique step for the Internet and not without its attendant risks. How did we get here?

A Great Collaborative Effort: Increasing the Strength of the Zone Signing Key for the Root Zone

A few weeks ago, on Oct. 1, 2016, Verisign successfully doubled the size of the cryptographic key that generates DNSSEC signatures for the internet's root zone. With this change, root zone DNS responses can be fully validated using 2048-bit RSA keys. This project involved work by numerous people within Verisign, as well as collaborations with ICANN, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

.US Hosts its Annual Town Hall Meeting

Neustar, a leading provider of registry services, is hosting a Town Hall meeting this month for the United States' country code Top-Level Domain, .US. Neustar introduced the .US Town Hall last year to reflect our commitment -- and the Commerce Department commitment to the bottom-up, multistakeholder model of DNS management. The public forum is an important part of ensuring that .US continues to be a vibrant namespace that reflects America's diversity, creativity, and innovative spirit.

How to Handle an Outage Like a Pro

In just the last two weeks, there were three major DNS outages between Google, Microsoft Azure, and Fonality. But only one of these companies was able to make even bigger waves with the way they handled their blunder. Fonality, who sells VoIP services and business phone systems, offered a very rare and transparent analysis of their outage. In a detailed statement from Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Valentine, readers were given crucial insight on how to prevent the same mistakes from happening to other companies.

The Wild West Of Performance Measurement: Using Data To Ensure Optimal Vendor Selection

Data-driven decision making relies on contextual understanding of how data is gathered and the type of analysis used to arrive at an outcome. The popularity of data-driven decision-making has increased the number of companies using statistics to support a preference or vendor selection. The Internet Performance Management (IPM) market hasn't been spared, but, unlike other markets where institutions have codified a standard for qualification and quantification, such as the FDA's nutrition labels, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or the Coffee Quality Institute, the IPM market is still in the Wild West stage.

Increasing the Strength of the Zone Signing Key for the Root Zone, Part 2

A few months ago I published a blog post about Verisign's plans to increase the strength of the Zone Signing Key (ZSK) for the root zone. I'm pleased to provide this update that we have started the process to pre-publish a 2048-bit ZSK in the root zone for the first time on Sept. 20. Following that, we will publish root zones with the larger key on Oct. 1, 2016.

Refutation of the Worst IANA Transition FUD

Of all the patently false and ridiculous articles written this month about the obscure IANA transition which has become an issue of leverage in the partisan debate over funding the USG via a Continuing Resolution, this nonsense by Theresa Payton is the most egregiously false and outlandish. As such, it demands a critical, nearly line by line response.

DDOS Attackers - Who and Why?

Bruce Schneier's recent blog post, "Someone is Learning How to Take Down the Internet", reported that the incidence of DDOS attacks is on the rise. And by this he means that these attacks are on the rise both in the number of attacks and the intensity of each attack. A similar observation was made in the Versign DDOS Trends report for the second quarter of 2015, reporting that DDOS attacks are becoming more sophisticated and persistent in the second quarter of 2016.