In January we presented the glorious history of the MIT spam conference, today we present the schedule for the first day. Opening session will be from this author, Garth Buren with a topic entitled The Internet Doomsday Book, with details be released the same day as the presentation. Followed by Dr. Robert Bruen with a review of activities since the last MIT spam conference... more
For more than 15 years, the IETF has been working on DNSSEC, a set of extensions to apply digital signatures to DNS. Millions of dollars in government grants and several reboots from scratch later, DNSSEC is just starting to see real world testing. And that testing is minimal -- only about 400 of the more than 85,000,000 .com domains support DNSSEC, fewer than 20% of US government agencies met their mandated December 31, 2009 deadline for DNSSEC deployment, and only two of the thirteen root zone name servers is testing with even dummy DNSSEC data. more
Security is great when all the green lights are shining brightly and everything validates as intended, but what happens when you encounter failure? In this work we examine the behaviour of the DNS when security, in the form of DNSSEC is added, and we look at what happens when things do not happen as intended. What triggered this examination was a sudden increase in the traffic generated by secondary servers for the in-addr.arpa reverse zones in December 2009. more
No one can have failed to notice that the last IPv4 address will soon be allocated. We have lived with a shortage of addresses for 15 years, but when the last address is allocated, the shortage will become acute, instead of just a pain, as it is today... In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes the least expensive and most effective method for making something invisible. You simply decide that it is Someone Else's Problem or SEP, if you abbreviate. This is an approach that is frighteningly similar to the Swedish public sector's view of the address shortage on the Internet. "It is not our problem -- if we ignore it, it will probably go away." more
SWITCH, the registry for .CH and .LI domain names, enabled DNSSEC on day two of the annual Domain Pulse conference in Luzern yesterday. SWITCH became the third ccTLD registry to enable DNSSEC giving registrants of .CH domain names added security following .SE (Sweden) and .CZ (Czech Republic). more
The 2010 Domain Pulse, hosted by SWITCH (the .CH registry) was held in the snowy Swiss city of Luzern. Domain Name Security (DNS) was of particular importance in this year's meeting with DNSSEC being implemented in the root zone in 2010 by ICANN, and by many registries in the next few years. ICANN plan to have all root servers signed with DNSSEC by mid-2010 Kim Davies, Manager, Root Zone Services at ICANN told the meeting, starting with the L root server, then A root server with the last being the J root server as all are gradually signed. more
I have previously pointed out the shortcomings of good and user friendly support for DNSSEC in Microsoft's Server 2008 R2. During the period just after I wrote the post, I had a dialogue with Microsoft, but during the last months there has been no word at all. The reason I bring this up again is that more and more Top Level Domains (TLDs) now enable DNSSEC and also the fact that within six months the root will be signed. more
Looking back at the year that just ended, here are the top ten most popular news, blogs, and industry news on CircleID in 2009 based on the overall readership of the posts. Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership in 2009 and best wishes to the entire community in 2010. more
A big security news event last night and today is that the Twitter.com Web site was hacked and content on the site replaced. TechCrunch reported it and it has been picked up globally. But - was the Twitter.com website really hacked? We now know it was not so. There are four ways that users typing in Twitter.com would have seen the Iranian Cyber Army page. more
ISOTF Critical Internet Infrastructure WG is now open to public participation. The group holds top experts on internet technology, critical infrastructure, and internet governance, from around the globe. Together, we discuss definitions, problems, challenges and solutions in securing and assuring the reliability of the global internet infrastructure, which is critical infrastructure for a growing number of nations, corporations and indeed, individuals -- world wide. more
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