In a video introduction, Affilias chief marketing officer Roland LaPlante explains the significance of the .INFO domain DNSSEC rollout.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Internet infrastructure services provider Afilias (www.afilias.info) has enabled Domain Name System Security Extensions for the .INFO top-level domain, enhancing global security for more than 6.5 million registered domains, making it the seventh largest TLD in the world.
According to Afilias’ announcement this week, .INFO was officially signed on September 1, 2010 and its Delegation Signer records were entered into the DNS root by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (www.iana.org) on September 4, allowing the .INFO zone to be validated using DNSSEC.
“The deployment of DNSSEC for .INFO continues Afilias’ long-standing commitment to ensure security in the domain name system,” Afilias executive vice president and chief technology officer Ram Mohan said in a statement. “Once fully deployed in .INFO, DNSSEC will provide a trusted foundation to authenticate DNS queries and responses and prevent DNS hijacking.”
DNSSEC protects the DNS from cache poisoning exploits, which can allow malicious entities to intercept an Internet users’ request to access a website, and redirect or eavesdrop on the user without their knowledge, and with no ability to reassert control. DNSSEC adds digital signatures to the DNS infrastructure that automatically ensures users are not hijacked and taken to an unintended destination.
Afilias prepared a short video explaining the significance of the .INFO domain DNSSEC rollout.
Earlier this year Afilias signed the .ORG zone with domain name security extensions for the Public Interest Registry (www.pir.org), the organization behind the .org top-level domain name, effectively making it the first open TLD to fight DNS hijacking using DNSSEC.
The signing of the .INFO zone, Afilias reports, represents the first step in Afilias’ recently announced the “Project Safeguard” initiative, which will see the rollout DNSSEC across its registry and DNS platforms. Project Safeguard also includes an education and training program for Registrars to enable DNSSEC in their registration systems for website owners who intend to add DNSSEC signatures to their individual domains.
Now that the TLD is signed, Afilias will activate a “friends and family” period designed for the public to gain experience with a select group of .INFO second-level domain names that have also been signed.
Research and development company Shinkuro (www.shinkuro.com) and telecom Comcast (www.comcast.com) are among those participating in this testing period. The list of “friends and family” domains includes: afilias.info, info.info, shinkuro.info, comcast.info, and 19 other domains from Comcast.
Later this year Afilias will be enabling DNSSEC for many of the other TLDs that it supports, in total adding DNSSEC for 13 more TLDs before the end of the year.
