Internet Security and Programming

The Bush administration has ordered all federal agencies to adopt new measures to shore up the security of government Web sites, setting a January 2009 deadline for implementing the changes across all dot-gov domains. Agencies will be required to roll out domain name system security extensions (DNSSEC), a set of security add-ons for the domain name system. DNS is a fundamental piece of the Internet infrastructure that acts as a kind of distributed Internet phone book used to route messages between computers. The trouble with the current implementation of DNS is that it was developed and implemented in an era when the Internet was a much smaller and friendlier place, where the handful of researchers who used the system trusted one another. These days, however, cyber crooks are eager to divert Internet traffic to fraudulent or hostile sites by constantly seeking to poison the DNS records on consumer PCs [...]

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