Archive for May, 2012

Today, SIDN, the Foundation for Internet Domain Registration in the Netherlands, announced that DNSSEC is operational for the .NL ccTLD (English translation here).  The announcement identifies nine registrars offering DNSSEC support for .NL as of today.

“SIDN is committed to making the internet more secure. And we regard DNSSEC as an important tool for achieving enhanced DNS security,” said Roelof Meijer, SIDN’s CEO

Congratulations to the University of Washington, which took first place at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC) in April—the first to emphasize the use of DNSSEC in its challenges.

Each year, the NCCDC tasks teams of collegiate programmers with defending business networks just as in real life, while Red Teams try to penetrate them. This year’s competition involved 126 schools and over 1,500 competitors.  Thanks to input from the DHS S&T Directorate, it marked the first time teams were asked to not only sign the zones on their DNS servers, but re-sign them as if they’d migrated their DNS services to a different operating system or application software.

According to organizer Dwayne Williams, roughly 80% of the competitors had heard of DNSSEC before, but less than 10% had ever actually used or implemented it prior to NCCDC. While two of the teams noted that they would like to see simpler, step-by-step instructions for implementing DNSSEC, all of the teams ultimately thought DNSSEC was a technology they planned to look at more in the future.

Overall team reaction was positive and Dwayne Williams notes that the NCCDC succeeded in introducing DNSSEC to all competitors and making them aware of some of its fundamental capabilities.

Lisa '12 CFP

There are still a couple weeks left to submit your DNSSEC  papers, etc. to LISA ’12.  This, the Usenix Association‘s 26th Large Installation System Administration Conference,  will be held December 9-12, 2012 in San Diego, California.    General conference information is here.

Steve Crocker

Steve Crocker, ICANN board chairmen and DNSSEC Deployment Initiative member, was inducted into the Internet Society’s Internet Hall of Fame as an Internet Pioneer.

Steve was honored for a lifetime of Internet accomplishments, including starting the RFC series. He talked about the RFCs and the openness of Internet protocols several years ago in his New York Times Op Ed, How the Internet Got Its Rules, on the 40th anniversary of the publication of RFC 1.

Steve continues to push for improvement of Internet infrastructure security, including the deployment of DNSSEC and the adoption of BCP 38.