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EDUCAUSE and VeriSign announced today the initiation of a project to enhance Internet reliability and stability.

March 2010, the project will deploy a security system known as Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC) within the .edu portion of the Internet, which EDUCAUSE manages under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce. When the project is completed, institutions whose domain names end in .edu will be able to incorporate a digital signature into those names to limit a variety of security vulnerabilities.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the part of the Internet that translates names such as "educause.edu" into numeric addresses (for example, 198.59.61.90). All Internet applications—from electronic mail to online banking—depend on the accuracy and integrity of this translation. Over the years, Internet security experts have discovered a variety of ways that DNS translation may be compromised. The DNSSEC security system limits the problem by allowing owners of domain names to provide a digital signature that adds an extra level of authentication to the translation process.
The project plan includes a test-bed implementation, targeted for September 2009, to allow predeployment testing by a number of selected campuses in a nonproduction environment. Final deployment of DNSSEC for .edu will build on the previously announced U.S. Department of Commerce project to deploy DNSSEC at the authoritative root zone of the Internet.

To read the entire article visit : http://www.educause.edu/About+EDUCAUSE/PressReleases/SecurityofeduInternetDomaintoI/178963