Can .gov trust .com?

DNSSEC deployment picks up speed, but domains are still islands of trust

The last of 13 servers in the Domain Name System’s authoritative root zone was digitally signed with the DNS Security Extensions May 5, paving the way for the publication this summer of the root trust anchor that will remove a major hurdle to the widespread deployment of DNSSEC.

“Since the beginning of the year, we have been incrementally rolling out DNSSEC in the root zone,” said Joe Waldron, director of product management at VeriSign Naming Services.

The DNS root zone, which contains the records needed to resolve the domain names used by people and applications to the numerical IP addresses used by routers and servers, is overseen by the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the files are managed by VeriSign. DNSSEC provides a layer of security on the Internet by using cryptographic digital signatures to authenticate responses to DNS queries. The effort by NTIA, VeriSign and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to deploy DNSSEC in the root zone has been called the biggest structural improvement to the DNS in 20 years.

Source:  Can .gov trust .com?, William Jackson, GNC, Retrieved on Jun 03, 2010 from gcn.com/articles/2010/06/07/dnssec-update.aspx

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