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The results are in! According to .ORG’s second bi-annual "The Dashboard" report, the .ORG domain has experienced unparalleled growth during the first half of 2010 in comparison to 2009’s half-year report. Case in point, in the first six months of 2010, the .ORG domain grew by 7.6 percent—more than doubling last year’s first half gain of 3.2 percent. Not to mention that this increase in registrations has brought .ORG’s total domains under management to an astounding 8.5 million. That’s 500,000 more .ORG communities than 6 months ago!

On July 28th DNSSEC took center stage at the 2010 Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas.  Two years ago, at the same conference, Dan Kaminsky unveiled the infamous DNS bug that many believe became a major catalyst for DNSSEC implementation.  To kick things off, Jeff Moss -founder of Black Hat - in his opening speech called out the fact that "we have not solved any fundamental problems” and noted that the technical community must catch up. Providing countless band-aids for major issues is not acceptable when working towards a safe and secure internet for all.  Roughly four hours later Rod Beckstrom declared to a packed room of reporters that “DNSSEC is the biggest structural improvement in the Internet in 20 years, specifically, since the introduction of the world wide web.”  Clearly, DNSSEC is not a band-aid fix.  

As the world’s third largest domain, Internet security takes utmost precedence at .ORG, The Public Interest Registry (PIR).  On June 23, we reinforced our commitment by announcing at ICANN Brussels that .ORG is now the first generic top-level domain (TLD) to offer full DNSSEC deployment.  Coming off the heels of this momentous launch, we are pleased that three leading registrars - GoDaddy, DynDNS and NamesBeyond – now support Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) for .ORG domain names, adding an extra layer of security of all .ORG domain name holders. Simply put, registrars like GoDaddy, who handles more than 30% of web registrations worldwide, are now a critical player and influence in widespread DNSSEC deployment.
 

It's no secret that Comcast has been leading the charge of DNSSEC deployment among ISPs.  For the past couple years, Comcast has been testing and pushing for the widespread adoption of DNSSEC.  In the spirit of increasing adoption, I thought I would interview the DNS gurus at Comcast to see what they’ve learned and what advice they would give other ISPs considering DNSSEC deployment.

1. What is the benefit to an end user when an ISP supports DNSSEC?

The global deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is charging ahead. With ICANN 38 Brussels just around the corner, DNSSEC deployment will inevitably be the hot topic of discussion over the next few days. Case in point, today, ICANN hosted the first production key ceremony at a secure facility in Culpepper, Va. where the first cryptographic digital key was used to secure the Internet root zone.