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For nearly all communications on today's Internet, domain names play a crucial role in providing stable navigation anchors for accessing information in a predictable and safe manner, irrespective of where you're located or the type of device or network connection you're using. Over the past 15 years hundreds of millions of domain names have been added to the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), and well over two billion (that's Billion!) new users, some ~34 percent of the global population, have become connected. more
Verisign recently published a technical report on new generic top-level domain (gTLD) security and stability considerations. The initial objective of the report was to assess for Verisign's senior management our own operational preparedness for new gTLDs, as both a Registry Service Provider for approximately 200 strings, as well as a direct applicant for 14 new gTLDs... However, in cataloging internal and external risks related to the new gTLD program, we found several far-reaching and long-standing issues that need to be further explored and/or resolved with varying levels of urgency. more
It would be one of the ironies of global technology development that the West has effectively so far followed a Jugaad principle of "good enough" innovation for DNS security, whereas India could well embrace all the latest advances in DNS security as its Internet economy grows. Like most other protocols from the early Internet, the DNS protocol was not designed with security built in. For those protocols, security services were typically either implemented at a different layer of the protocol stack, or were added on later. more
For a number of years, there have been many different high profile incidents where major websites were defaced, taken offline, or crippled due to issues related to their domain registration. Last night, there was an incident where several high profile domains went offline due to issues at their registrar, and they are now coming back online after what I am sure was a few crazy hours for their operations teams and management. more
The impact of the recently revealed US government data collection practices may go well beyond the privacy ramifications outlined in the Internet Society's statement: expect a chilling effect on global, resilient network architecture. As governments of other countries realize how much of their citizens' traffic flows through the US, whether or not it is destined for any user or service there, expect to see moves to curtail connections to and through the US. more
The U.S. Government is causing a huge disservice to protection and defense in the private sector (80%+ of CIKR) by creating an ECS that contains monetary incentive for a few large players to exert undue control over the availability, distribution, and cost of security threat indicators. While there may be a legitimate need for the federal government to share classified indicators to entities for protecting critical infrastructure, the over-classification of indicator data is a widely recognized issue that presents real problems for the private sector. ECS as currently construed creates monetary incentives for continued or even expanded over-classification. more
In today's world with botnets, viruses and other nefarious applications that use DNS to further their harmful activities, outbound DNS security has been largely overlooked. As a part of multi-layer security architecture, a DNS Firewall should not be ignored. After serving as a consultant for multiple organizations, I have encountered many companies that allow all internal devices to send outbound DNS queries to external DNS servers - a practice that can lead to myriad problems. more
In the wake of increasingly lenient bring your own device (BYOD) policies within large corporations, there's been a growing emphasis upon restricting access to business applications (and data) to specific geographic locations. Over the last 18 months more than a dozen start-ups in North America alone have sprung up seeking to offer novel security solutions in this space - essentially looking to provide mechanisms for locking application usage to a specific location or distance from an office, and ensuring that key data or functionality becomes inaccessible outside these prescribed zones. more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has released new guidance concerning the reporting and disclosure of bugs that affect the Domain Name System, including information of how ICANN itself will behave in response to vulnerabilities. Until recently, ICANN, which is responsible for maintaining the root domain servers at the heart of the DNS system, had no specific guidelines for the reporting of vulnerabilities, leaving responsible disclosure protocols up to the researchers who discovered the bug. more
There has been plenty of buzz and chatter on the Internet recently concerning a very large DDoS attack against CloudFlare, with coverage on their blog, the New York Times, and the BBC, among many others. While attacks of this nature are certainly nothing new, the scale of this attack was surprising, reported to hit 120Gbps. For a sense of scale, your average cable modem is only about 20Mbps, or about 0.016% of that bandwidth. more
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