Hardware and software solutions for deploying DNSSEC were awarded two of the 15 “Best of FOSE” awards from Government Computer News this week, including:

Both companies participated in the vendor panel on “lessons learned” at the DNSSEC Deployment Coordination Initiative’s “What’s Next in DNSSEC” program yesterday.  We’ll be posting slides from the entire session late this week.  Congratulations to Xlerance and Data Mountain Solutions.

While we’re listening in Washington to the final “What’s Next in DNSSEC” session at the FOSE conference, Wolfgang Nagele reported on Twitter today that the D, K and E DNS root servers (operated by the University of Maryland, RIPE NCC and NASA, respectively) are serving the DNSSEC-enabled root zone.  As this story in The H Online notes, “this means that seven of the 13 central root servers which constitute the Domain Name System (DNS) responsible for domain name resolution on the internet will then return signed responses.”  (Because these are prototype signed zones, they cannot be validated until the full root is signed, which is expected to occur July 1.)

AFNIC has announced that the .fr (France) and .re (Reunion Island) country code top-level domains will be signed with DNSSEC beginning September 14th, 2010.  You can read more about AFNIC’s DNSSEC program here.

Will we see you there?  Below is the updated program for the DNSSEC Deployment Coordination Initiative’s special session at the FOSE conference and exhibition. “What’s Next in DNSSEC: Securing the Domain Name System,” set for tomorrow, Wednesday, March 24, 2010, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.  The conference attracts U.S. government information technology professionals in Washington, D.C.  In addition to the session, the FOSE Expo will include a special DNSSEC Pavilion with booths from the Initiative as well as other DNSSEC-related exhibitors. 

Registration for FOSE is free for U.S. government employees, government contractors and U.S. military, and registration for the Expo is $50.  Go here to register for FOSE. 

Here is the program for the DNSSEC session:

What’s Next in DNSSEC: Securing the Domain Name System

Morning session:

10:00-10:15         What’s next in DNSSEC:  Overview

Speaker: 

Douglas Maughan, Ph.D., Program Manager, Cyber Security R&D, Science & Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and sponsor, DNSSEC Deployment Coordination Initiative

10:15-11:00         Advancing Federal DNSSEC Deployment: What to Look For in 2010

Speakers:           

Deploying DNSSEC at the Root:  Scott Rose, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Getting DNSSEC into Trusted Internet Connections:  Sean Donelon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security 

11:00-11:15        Break

11:15-11:45         From Trust to Transparency: DNSSEC and Open Government

Speakers:

DNSSEC and Open Government: White House Office of Management and Budget (Speaker TBA)

Government-funded Open-Source DNSSEC Tools: Russ Mundy, Sparta

11:45-12:30         Beyond Federal Deployment: The Next Wave

Speakers:

Deploying DNSSEC Across a Public-Private Network – R. Kevin Oberman, Energy Sciences Network (ESnet, Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Deploying DNSSEC in .us — Keith Drazek, Director, Government and Industry Relations, Neustar

Deploying DNSSEC in Commercial and Education — Lauren Price, Senior Product Marketing Manager and Chair of the DNSSEC Industry Coalition, .org, the Public Interest Registry

Deploying DNSSEC in the Educational and Commercial Sectors – Joe Waldron, Director of Product Management, VeriSign, Inc.

12:30-2pm           Break for visiting exhibit floor

Afternoon session:

2:00-2:45              Why DNSSEC Applies to More Federal Systems in 2010

Speakers:

FISMA Requirements and DNSSEC – Doug Montgomery and Kelley Dempsey, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Updated Requirements from NIST Apply to More Federal Systems – Scott Rose, National Institute of Standards and Technology

2:45-3:00              Break

3:00-4:15              Beyond the Mandate:  Getting Lessons—and Value—From Deployment

 An invited panel of vendors with experience assisting federal agencies with DNSSEC deployment will offer brief lessons learned and field audience questions on getting value from deployment.  Moderated by Steve Crocker of Shinkuro and Scott Rose of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  

Speakers include: 

Michael Young, Vice President, Product Development, Afilias

Chris Parker-James, Product Manager, BlueCat Networks

Derek McUmber, CEO, Data Mountain Solutions

Nathan Meyer, Product Manager, F5 Networks

Victor Danevitch, Infoblox

Norm Ritchie, Programmes Development Manager, Internet Systems Consortium

William Billings, U.S. Federal Chief Security Officer, Microsoft

Jon Shalowitz, Executive Vice President of Marketing, Nominum

Mark Beckett, Vice President, Marketing, Secure64

Patrick Naubert, Chief Technology Officer, Xelerance

CZ.NIC, the registry for the Czech Republic, has announced that 70,000 additional .CZ zones now have been signed, bringing the registry’s total past 87,000 DNSSEC-signed zones as of the time of the announcement.  A counter placed at the bottom of the CZ.NIC homepage shows more than 95,000 zones signed as of this writing.  As a result, the Czech registry is “largest registry in the world that registers domains protected in this way.”

In this video interview, Gray Chynoweth, vice president of business operations for Dyn Inc. interviews Initiative partner Steve Crocker, CEO of Shinkuro Inc., at ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya.

In this post on Twitter, Nominet IT director Simon McCalla announces that .uk is now signed.

We’ve updated the program for the daylong session “What’s Next in DNSSEC” at the FOSE conference and expo, coming up later in March.  Go here to see the current roster of speakers and topics on DNSSEC deployment in the federal government, state government, public-private systems, commercial networks and more.