SIDN, manager of The Netherlands’ .nl zone and ENUM NL, has published the public key for .nl in the root and created a “Friends & Fans” program to encourage DNSSEC deployment and gain practical experience with the security extensions.

DNSSEC-experienced registrants now have “the option of publishing the ‘public keys’ for a small number of domain names,” and including them in the .nl zone file, beginning with sidn.nl, gigaport.nl and surfnet.nl.

SIDN CEO Roelof Meijer noted:

The Friends and Fans program is the next step towards the introduction of DNSSEC for all .nl domain names. That goal should be achieved by the end 2011. Over the last few months, we have seen market interest in DNSSEC really start to take off: about 60 TLDs (top-level domains) are now signed, compared with just 20 at the start of the year. In March 2011, .com is going to be signed as well, and we fully anticipate still greater interest in DNSSEC before the year is out.