News

Register of National Internet Domain Names of Serbia (RNIDS) organised the DNSSEC implementation workshop on 16 and 17 May at hotel ‘Moskva’ in Belgrade with Patrik Wallström and Rickard Bellgrim from the Swedish national registry as lecturers.

The workshop gathered about thirty participants who dealt with installing and maintaining DNS servers. DNS is considered to be one of the pillars the Internet is build on and thus the security and accuracy of data provided by DNS is critical for the survival of the Internet as an ordered space.

DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) is a set of extensions for DNS servers increasing the security of DNS service users by cryptographically signing DNS responses using the public key so that their authenticity can be checked. Signing entire zones on DNS servers enables the confidence first among various DNS servers that exchange information and then with the end user who gets the accurate and unchanged information about the location of a particular server.

Malicious activities of modifying the content of a DNS cache, which are well known, imply entering false, altered IP addresses of particular servers into the cache. If the user searches for www.some-bank.rs, instead of the correct IP address he will get the one that the attacker has entered into the DNS cache and thus directed the user to a wrong website where he could be required to provide his confidential information. DNSSEC prevents precisely such problems.

RNIDS plans to introduce DNSSEC for the local .RS and .СРБ Internet domain space and in doing so join the European registries which have already enabled it to their users. 

On May 14, 2012, Canada’s .CA turned 25 years old. It was on this day in 1987 that the .CA top-level domain was officially delegated by Jon Postel, operator of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), to John Demco at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Two years ago domain .РФ became one of the first IDN-domains in the world on May 12, 2012 registers of root server of global domain addresses received an entry about Cyrillic domain .РФ and on November 11, 2010 domain started an open registration of domain names.

Yesterday, it was granted for the second time, the Database Award of the German computer magazine "COMPUTERWOCHE" and its partner Oracle.

Innovative spirit, strategic importance to the company and sophisticated technologies are the criteria to determine the winners. This year, DENIC is one of them. Participating for the first time, the registry immediately won the second place.

As the second-largest Internet registry in the world, DENIC administers the more than 15 million domain names of the German Top Level Domain .de.

Accordingly, the requirements to be met by the database, the core applications, like the registration system and the whois lookup service, and the accounting system are very demanding. The data amount having grown to terabyte level, time had come to upgrade the old database and adapt it to today's business needs. DENIC decided to carry out a complete redesign of the data model and launched the DB refactoring project. The aim of this project was improved data integrity at enhanced performance to thus create a database that facilitated future adaptations.

Database migration during ongoing operation to ensure uninterrupted availability of all DENIC services was the particular challenge of the project. To this end, two databases – the old one and a new one – were operated in parallel, so that service migration could be implemented step by step without disturbing operation. In the first step, data were entered and continually updated in the new database. This process was accompanied by repeated consistency checks of the old and the new database. Long-term parallel operation of the two databases made the last step, the shut-down of the old database on 27 December 2011, almost a formality.

All in all a tremendous challenge. The jury was impressed: "The project illustrated how sustainability can be achieved through an innovative data model," reads the motivation of the jury’s choice. "Moreover, the new system was launched with a terabyte migration during ongoing operation, and the users did not even notice it."

The result is a high-performance database that processes business transactions up to ten times quicker than before and that provides a future-proof data model. "Our staff has been greatly committed to implement this project successfully," says Marcos Sanz Grossón, Head of DENIC's Software Engineering Department. "I am very pleased about the recognition the project has received with the Database Award; it will be an incentive for our future work."

In a video portrait created by COMPUTERWOCHE and commented by the jury, experts from DENIC provide background information and explicate the meaning of the project:

Nominet, the not-for-profit organisation responsible for the smooth and secure running of the .uk infrastructure, announces the launch of a brand campaign to support its business delivering internet domain names ending in .uk.

The campaign, called ‘A great place to be’ emphasizes the benefits of having a .co.uk, .org.uk or .me.uk  domain name for businesses, organisations or individuals in establishing a UK-centric, trusted internet presence.

Highlighting the trust and status associated with .uk domain names, a campaign website at www.agreatplacetobe.co.uk will be the hub of the campaign, featuring customer testimonials as part of its creative execution, supported by online and off-line awareness campaigns targeting potential registrants. Promotions and supporting materials for the .uk sales channel - Nominet’s registrars - will follow.

This news follows Nominet passing the milestone of the registration of the 10 millionth .uk domain in March 2012.

The campaign is focused on delivering and building a compelling .uk brand story for businesses and consumers, and will build on the solid foundations of trust, status and reliability.

“According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, more than 20% of British businesses still do not have their own website” says Phil Kingsland, Director of Marketing and Communications at Nominet.

“As we look to continue to grow .uk’s leadership in a changing market, the internet offers these ‘offline’ small and mid-sized businesses a significant untapped opportunity. These businesses are often local, community centric and therefore stand to gain the most from using a .uk domain as the online home for their business.”

Jonathan Jones, Commercial Director at Tregothnan, attributes the company’s .uk domain with the success of the business in an online video for the campaign: “.co.uk is a really good way of us communicating what we are and the products that we have… it’s a way of expressing our Britishness to our consumers. It’s about trust: if I go online and I see .co.uk, I know about provenance, I know where they’re from, and I think our customers like to know about that too.”

The campaign is targeted with increasing the annual growth rate of the .uk register - currently at 9.3%.

Notes to editors

• Brand identity work was developed with Design Bridge
• Digital campaign elements were created by Outside Line
• For information on the history and growth of the .uk registry, please visit http://db.nominet.org.uk/

For more information

Please contact Patrick Yiu at Brands2Life
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
+44 20 7592 1200

Hostmaster, the .UA domain operator, placed information about the domains .AZ (Azerbaijan) and .GE (Georgia) on its DNS servers.

This helped to enhance fault tolerance and operational reliability of Azerbaijan's and Georgia's domain systems, in particular under high loads. Moreover, Ukrainian Internet users will benefit from faster loading of web sites in these domains.

Hostmaster's DNS servers are located both in Ukraine (in regional capitals) and outside the country, which provides users from all over the globe with fast access to Ukrainian web sites.

source: https://hostmaster.ua/news/?pr20120509

Publishing house HUB Uitgevers has appointed SIDN, to undertake technical realisation of the new top-level internet domain (TLD) .amsterdam. Amsterdam’s municipal authority asked HUB Uitgevers to operate the Dutch capital’s TLD after careful market research. The expectation is that the new TLD will come on line in 2013. Pre-registration is possible at puntamsterdam.nl and dotamsterdam.nl from 7 May.

Roelof Meijer, SIDN’s CEO said, “Naturally we are very pleased that Amsterdam and HUB have chosen SIDN to handle the technical realisation of .amsterdam. With nearly five million registered .nl domain names, we have vast experience with all aspects of domain nameregistration. We expect new TLDs such as .amsterdam to change the internet landscape. Clearly, therefore, we want to be involved in this development.”

Click to go to article

"In the first eight hours of liberalization of the domain, the portuguese Internet grew by almost 5%. The process ends with old restrictions and can mean economic potential for the country."

The DNSSEC Deployment Initiative, in cooperation with the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), is planning a DNSSEC Workshop at the ICANN meeting in Prague, Czech Republic on 27 June 2012.  The DNSSEC Workshop has been a part of ICANN meetings for several years and has provided a forum for both experienced and new people to meet, present and discuss current and future DNSSEC deployments.  For reference, the most recent session was held at the ICANN Costa Rica meeting on 14 March 2012. The presentations and transcripts of the presentations are available at http://costarica43.icann.org/node/29659.

We are seeking presentations on the following topics:

1.  DNSSEC activities in Europe
This is a key panel and we are seeking participation from those who have been involved in DNSSEC deployment in Europe as well as those who have a keen interest in the challenges and benefits of deployment.  Key questions are to consider include: what would help to promote DNSSEC deployment?  What are the challenges you have faced when you deployed DNSSEC?  Can DNSSEC make the information users receive more reliable? 

2. ISPs and Validation
 ISPs are beginning to take the first step to full DNSSEC implementation that will allow web users, with software applications like browsers, to validate that the destination they are trying to reach is authentic and not a spoofed website.  We are seeking ISPs to participate in a panel discussion or provide presentations on their DNSSEC deployment plans, challenges, and benefits for users.

3. The realities of running DNSSEC
Now that DNSSEC has become an operational norm for many registries and registrars, what have we learned about how we manage DNSSEC? What's best practice around key rollovers? How often do you review your disaster recovery procedures? Is there operational familiarity within your customer support teams? Has DNSSEC made DNS more 'brittle' or is it just a run-of-the-mill operational practice?

4.  DNSSEC and Enterprise Activities
DNSSEC has always been seen as a huge benefit to organizations looking to protect their identity and security on the Web. Large enterprises are an obvious target for DNS hackers and DNSSEC provides an ideal solution to this challenge. This session aims to look at the benefits and challenges of deploying DNSSEC for major enterprises. Topics for discussion:

• What is the current status of DNSSEC deployment among enterprises?
• What plans do the major enterprises have for their DNSSEC roadmaps?
• What are the challenges to deployment for these organizations?  Do they foresee raising awareness of DNSSEC with their customers?

5. When unexpected DNSSEC events occur
What have we learned from some of the operational outages that we have seen over the past 18 months? Are there lessons that we can pass on to those just about to implement DNSSEC? How do you manage dissemination of information about the outage? What have you learned about communications planning? Do you have a route to ISPs and registrars? How do you liaise with your CERT community?

6. DNSSEC in the wild
What operational statistics have we gathered about DNSSEC? Is it changing DNS patterns? How are our nameservers handling DNSSEC traffic? Is the volume as expected? Have we seen anything unusual?  Are there experiences being documented in the form of best practices, or something similar, for transfer of signed zones?

7. DANE and other DNSSEC applications
Using DNSSEC as a means of authentication for http transactions is an exciting development of DNSSEC. What is the progress of the DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) initiative? (See http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dane/.) How soon could DANE become a deployable reality and what will be the impact of such a deployment, e.g. impact on traditional certification authorities (CAs)?

8.  The Great DNSSEC Panel Quiz

Ever fancied pitting your wits against your colleagues?  Demonstrate your knowledge and expertise in DNSSEC in our Great DNSSEC Panel Quiz.  We are looking for four or five people to join us in a light-hearted quiz.

In addition, we welcome suggestions for additional topics.  If you are interested in participating, please send a brief (1-2 sentence) description of your proposed presentation.  Here are the relevant deadlines:

10 May 2012 — Deadline to submit brief description of presentation from interested participants
04 June 2012 — Deadline to submit presentation slides

Please respond to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. no later than 10 May 2012 as indicated above.   We hope that you can join us.

Thank you,

Julie Hedlund

On behalf of the DNSSEC Workshop Program Committee:
Luis Diego Espinoza, NIC .cr
Steve Crocker, Shinkuro
Simon McCalla, Director of IT, Nominet UK
Russ Mundy, Cobham
Ondřej Surý, NIC.cz
Lance Wolak, Vice President, Marketing & Sales, .ORG, The Public Interest Registry

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 Ondřej Surý -- Chief Science Officer
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