For many years, our association has been running a service going by the acronym “ODVR” – Open DNSSEC Validating Resolvers. At times when DNSSEC was just beginning, we thought it was necessary to come up with an alternative to DNS resolvers provided by ISPs who introduced the validation support too slowly. Since then, we have offered a publicly available service that allows validation of domains using DNSSEC security even in those networks whose default DNS resolvers do not support this.
New statistics and increase in popularity of elliptic curves in DNSSEC
It has been almost half a year since we presented the intention to change the DNSSEC algorithm for .cz zone DNSSEC key at our IT 16.2 conference. In his presentation, our colleague Zdeněk Brůna described in detail the advantages of algorithms based on elliptic curves, especially the ECDSA algorithm. However, due to the situation where this step cannot be done because of the lack of support for this algorithm in the root zone, our activities have shifted to mainly educate and monitor the impact of this education on the state of support for this new technology. At a seminar with registrars that we held at the end of February, we noticed a positive response to some ECDSA properties, such as smaller zone file size or smaller DNS response size. Some registrars have already declared interest in switching to ECDSA. At the same time, the registrars have suggested that we publish statistics on our site showing how different DNSSEC algorithms are used in the .cz zone. We liked this idea and we are now publishing these statistics.