Tuesday, 08 December 2009 07:29 Domain News
SIDN, the registry for .nl and ENUM NL, announced that DNSSEC will be introduced for the .nl zone one month after the internet’s root servers are ‘signed’. ICANN, the organisation that manages the root, recently indicated that that will very probably happen in July 2010. So DNSSEC should be implemented for the .nl zone in August next year.DNSSECThe existing DNS protocol contains a number of vulnerabilities that mean it is not secure against threats such as ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks by unidentified parties. The perpetrators of such attacks can divert internet users to fake websites or intercept correctly addressed e-mail. DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) resolves these problems and therefore increases the reliability of the DNS. However, it is not a security panacea. DNSSEC cannot prevent typo squatting or phishing, for example. It also makes the DNS a lot more complex and more sensitive to errors. What’s more, various operational problems still need to be resolved. Nevertheless, the drawbacks are outweighed by the security benefits and we are convinced that the operational problems can all be overcome. So SIDN is working within the DNSSEC Industry Coalition to address the challenges associated with the protocol. SIDN is also an active contributor to opendnssec.org, the organisation that is developing open source software for DNSSEC.Signing domain names with DNSSECImplementing DNSSEC for a zone (tier 1) has a lot less impact than using DNSSEC to sign the domain names within that zone (tier 2). SIDN believes that a number of operational problems need to be resolved before tier 2 implementation is possible. A workable transfer process is required, for example. Key management also has to be organised for registries and registrants, and the maximum number of domain names that can be signed using a single key needs to be decided.With a view to removing these and other obstacles, SIDN has teamed up with various parties to set up the DNSSEC.NL platform.
For more information check out www.sidn.nl
