The Internet has become a global, complex, layered, and increasingly indispensable ecosystem. For purposes of this column, “Internet” includes the underlying digital transport infrastructure including subsea and land-based fiber and cable, orbiting satellites, the networks of routers, the Domain Name System, datacenters and their networks, edge devices of all kinds (laptops, desktops, pads, smartphones, Internet-enabled devices, and sensors), the World Wide Web, content distribution systems and, for all I know, the kitchen sink.
It’s not been a good week for auDA, the .au policy and regulatory body, and their backend registry provider Afilias. First on Tuesday there was a security incident that auDA claims saw “a small number of domains” disappear for half an hour. Then today with the launch of second level (or .au direct) registrations, there has been another stuff up that sees all new second level/direct registrations having to be manually entered after registration with no timeframe given for a resolution.
[news release] The ninth Africa Domain Name System (DNS) Forum will be held virtually from 27 to 28 July 2021 with the theme of “Evolving the DNS Ecosystem in Africa.”
[news release] A group led by UC Riverside computer security researchers unveiled discovery of a series of critical security flaws that could lead to a revival of DNS cache poisoning attacks this week at the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. The attack succeeds by derandomising the source port and works on all layers of caches in the DNS infrastructure, such as forwarders and resolvers.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) named Paul Mockapetris recipient of the 2019 ACM Software System Award for the development of the Domain Name System (DNS), according to an announcement from the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California.
