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80% of .gov Web Sites Miss DNSSEC Deadline

Posted by kdawson on from the not-a-priority dept.

netbuzz writes "Eighty percent of US federal agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security — have missed a deadline to deploy DNS Security Extensions, a new authentication mechanism designed to prevent hackers from hijacking Web traffic. The deadline that whooshed by was Dec. 31, 2009. Experts disagree as to whether this level of deployment represents a failure or reasonable progress toward meeting a mandate set by the Office of Management and Budget in the summer of 2008. OMB officials declined to say why the agency hasn't enforced the DNSSEC deadline for executive branch departments."

3 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How do you check? by HogGeek · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://lmgtfy.com/?q=dig+dnssec

  2. No mention of the .dov registrar mistakes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I am the DNS admin of a federal agency. We signed two of our domains, and twice had .gov delete the keys that allowed the domains to be trusted. We then got the run-around and were lied to by the .gov admin. My management and I are now afraid to make any further progress implementing DNSSEC because .gov has made so many mistakes. It is better to be unsigned than to be signed and have the trust keys be incorrect.

    Additionally, the tools to implement DNSSEC are non-trivial. A federal agency or Fortune 500 can afford to buy a Secure64 Signer. Looking forward to when I want to sign my personal domains (in .org and .com), the tools have to become much simpler and much more automated.

  3. I manage DNS for a .gov by snsh · · Score: 3, Informative

    I manage a .gov domain for a non-federal entity. Last year I pursued DNSSEC and hosted DNS to improve availability and diversity over our on-premise DNS. Windows DNS and BIND seemed okay for DNSSEC secondaries, but signing and key rollover are high-maintenance. Maybe in the near future that will change. There are appliances I could buy for $10-20k to manage master zones and do DNSSEC, but they were out of budget. I worked with a hosted provider (dynect) for DNSSEC singing with .GOV, but that turned out to be out of budget too. So eventually I just settled on dnsmadeeasy for nominal cost, with anticipation that they'll support DNSSEC sometime in mid-2010. Basically DNSSEC for the masses doesn't seem to be there yet.