Verisign and ICANN Renew Root Zone Maintainer Service Agreement

• By • Security

On October 20th, ICANN and Verisign renewed the agreement under which Verisign will continue to act as Root Zone Maintainer for the Domain Name System (DNS) for another 8-year term. The Root Zone sits atop the hierarchical architecture of the DNS and is essential to virtually all internet navigation, acting as the dynamic, cryptographically secure, global directory of all top-level domains that exist in the DNS. The Root Zone Maintainer is a unique role that ensures the cryptographic signing and publication of the Root Zone no less than once a day, without which, navigation on the internet would be impossible.

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Setting the Record Straight – Myths vs. Facts about .com

• By • Domain Names

Over the past several weeks, there has been significant discussion about Verisign and its management of the .com top-level domain (TLD) registry. Much of this discussion has been distorted by factual inaccuracies, a misunderstanding of core technical concepts, and misinterpretations regarding pricing, competition, and market dynamics in the domain name industry.

Billions of internet users and trillions of dollars in global commerce rely on the continuing security, stability, and resiliency of the .com TLD and the technical infrastructure that powers it, so it is vital that discussions about this topic be rooted in fact.

To set the record straight, we have collected and addressed the most common myths currently circulating about the .com TLD.

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Verisign Honors Vets in Technology For Military Appreciation Month

• By • Security

For Murray Green, working for a company that is a steward of critical internet infrastructure is a mission that he can get behind. Green, a senior engineering manager at Verisign, is a U.S. Army veteran who served during Operation Desert Storm and sees stewardship as a lifelong mission. In both roles, he has stayed focused on the success of the mission and cultivating great teamwork.

Teamwork is something that Laura Street, a software engineer and U.S. Air Force veteran, came to appreciate through her military service. It was then that she learned to appreciate how people from different backgrounds can work together on missions by finding their commonalities.

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Adding ZONEMD Protections to the Root Zone

• By • Security

The Domain Name System (DNS) root zone will soon be getting a new record type, called ZONEMD, to further ensure the security, stability, and resiliency of the global DNS in the face of emerging new approaches to DNS operation. While this change will be unnoticeable for the vast majority of DNS operators (such as registrars, internet service providers, and organizations), it provides a valuable additional layer of cryptographic security to ensure the reliability of root zone data.

In this blog, we’ll discuss these new proposals, as well as ZONEMD. We’ll share deployment plans, how they may affect certain users, and what DNS operators need to be aware of beforehand to ensure little-to-no disruptions.

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Minimized DNS Resolution: Into the Penumbra

• By • Security

Over the past several years, domain name queries – a critical element of internet communication – have quietly become more secure, thanks, in large part, to a little-known set of technologies that are having a global impact. Verisign CTO Dr. Burt Kaliski covered these in a recent Internet Protocol Journal article, and I’m excited to share more about the role Verisign has performed in advancing this work and making one particular technology freely available worldwide.

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Mysterious DNS Root Query Traffic from a Large Cloud/DNS Operator

More Mysterious DNS Root Query Traffic from a Large Cloud/DNS Operator

• By • Security

This blog was also published by APNIC.

With so much traffic on the global internet day after day, it’s not always easy to spot the occasional irregularity. After all, there are numerous layers of complexity that go into the serving of webpages, with multiple companies, agencies and organizations each playing a role.

That’s why when something does catch our attention, it’s important that the various entities work together to explore the cause and, more importantly, try to identify whether it’s a malicious actor at work, a glitch in the process or maybe even something entirely intentional.

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Routing Without Rumor: Securing the Internet’s Routing System

• By • Security

This article is based on a paper originally published as part of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace’s Cyberstability Paper Series, “New Conditions and Constellations in Cyber,” on Dec. 9, 2021.

The Domain Name System has provided the fundamental service of mapping internet names to addresses from almost the earliest days of the internet’s history. Billions of internet-connected devices use DNS continuously to look up Internet Protocol addresses of the named resources they want to connect to — for instance, a website such as blog.verisign.com. Once a device has the resource’s address, it can then communicate with the resource using the internet’s routing system.

Just as ensuring that DNS is secure, stable and resilient is a priority for Verisign, so is making sure that the routing system has these characteristics. Indeed, DNS itself depends on the internet’s routing system for its communications, so routing security is vital to DNS security too.

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