It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the early internet operated on the scale of kilobytes, with all spoken languages represented using a single character encoding – ASCII. Today’s global internet, so fundamental to society and the world’s economy, now enables access to orders of magnitude more information, connecting a speakers of a full spectrum of languages.
The research challenges continue to scale along with data volumes and user diversity.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) March 14, 2014, announcement proposing the transition of its legacy Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship role has presented the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) multi-stakeholder community equal amounts of opportunity and responsibility. We have been handed a singular opportunity to define the terms of any stewardship transition and the fundamental responsibility to get it right.
Getting it right means ensuring, through a bottom-up, multi-stakeholder process, the reform of ICANN’s accountability structures to protect the community and the multi-stakeholder model prior to NTIA’s disengagement from its oversight and stewardship role. It also means acting quickly and efficiently so our window of opportunity is not missed.
Verisign is pleased to announce the public introduction of getdns at The Next Web in Amsterdam (TNWEurope) April 23-24, 2014. Verisign Labs and NLNet Labs in collaboration have developed getdns, an open source implementation of the getdns-api application programming interface (api) specification.
At The Next Web, getdns is one of the challenge APIs in a 36-hour Hack Battle. Multiple teams of application coding experts are using getdns to develop innovative applications that leverage the global security infrastructure available through DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC).
Recent attacks targeting enterprise websites have created greater awareness around how critical DNS is for the reliability of internet services and the potentially catastrophic impact of a DNS outage. The DNS, made up of a complex system of root and lower level name servers, translates user-friendly domain names to numerical IP addresses. With few exceptions, DNS lives in a grey area between IT and network operations. With the increasing occurrences of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and exploitation of user errors through techniques such as typosquatting and phishing, enterprises can no longer take a passive role in managing their DNS internet infrastructure.
Guest post from Pat Kane, Senior Vice President, Naming and Directory Services
On Oct. 23, 2013, at approximately 11:00 a.m. EDT, Verisign received authorization instructions from the U.S. Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to delegate four new gTLDs into the root zone, which we are responsible for maintaining per the Cooperative Agreement between Verisign and NTIA. Verisign acted in accordance with our contractual obligation and delegated these TLDs into the root zone at 2:33 p.m. EDT the same day.
“There never were in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity”
–Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne (1533–1592)
Diversity is a central design principle of the Domain Name System. With respect to the DNS root, it’s the reason that there are 13 separately managed root servers with 12 independent operators. It’s the reason Verisign operates the two root servers we’re responsible for – the A and J roots – as well as other name servers – at multiple locations around the world. It’s also the reason that within these locations operated by Verisign, multiple physical servers handle the incoming traffic. And it’s the reason that among these multiple servers, we use multiple hardware and software platforms, as well as multiple network providers.
In other words, diversity is one reason the DNS industry in general, and Verisign in particular, doesn’t do everything the same way and in the same place.
As a technology leader whose career objective is to help build a connected digital world, it’s hard for me to envision a better place to be at this time in internet history than Verisign.
That’s what I needed to be convinced of earlier this year when I decided to leave a good job with great people at another leading IT company to become Verisign’s CTO. Seven months later, I haven’t been disappointed.