To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall ofthe Berlin Wall today, Berliners and other reunified Germans toppled a set of 1000 giant dominoes at the Brandenburg Gatea metaphor for the fall of Communism in states throughout the Eastern Bloc.
While not as dramatic or significant as the fall of European Communism, several dominoes on the path to broad implementation of the DNS Security Extensions fell recently:
- Switzerlands top-level zone, .ch, wassigned. I found this out in the nick of time: just before I gave asecurity-themed presentation in Zuerich, where I would have looked pretty dumb had I not known that .ch was signed just days before.
- Since SWITCH, the organization that runs the Swiss registry, also runs Liechtensteins registry, Liechtensteins top-level zone, .li, was signed, too. While Liechtensteins adoption of DNSSEC may seem like a footnote, remember that the country has more registered companies than citizens, including many financial services firms.
- Namibia became the first country in Africa witha DNSSEC-signed zone, .na. (And the upcoming movie adaptation of The Prisoner was filmed in the Namibian city of Swakopmund, so clearly big things are happening in the country.)
- Niues op-level zone, .nu, is signed. Sure, Niue is a tiny Pacific island nation (its population is less than that of a big Midwestern high school), but because nu means now in Swedish, it boasts a substantial population of Swedish registrants.
- Turkmenistans .tm zone is signed. Through a similar quirk, Turkmenistan attracts registrants because tm is commonly used as an abbreviation for trademark.
All of this is good news for those of us who believe that widespread deployment of DNSSEC will make the Internet asafer place.
There are still some very big dominoes that haven’t fallen, of course though they’re teetering: the root zone, .com, .net, .uk, .de,and more. The U.S. Departmentof Commerce has already announced that the root will be signed by July 1, 2010,and VeriSign will sign .net next year and .com in 2011. Plus my old friend Matt works for VeriSign as their Vice President of DNS Research, and if I’m not mistaken, I owe him money. I promise I won’t pay him back until VeriSign makes good on their commitments.
