Deploy360 12 June 2014

CIRA Makes DNSSEC Available For .CA Through Registrars

By Dan YorkDirector, Internet Technology

CIRA logoGreat news today for our friends up north in Canada – they can now sign their .CA domains with DNSSEC! As the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) said in a news release yesterday, they are making the Internet safer for all Canadians and noted:

DNSSEC builds a “chain of trust” between users and the websites they wish to visit. It helps counter malicious online activities such as DNS spoofing and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. These fraudulent activities are usually intended to capture personal information, such as bank account logins.

Perhaps even more importantly, DNSSEC will now let people with .CA domains use innovative new protocols like DANE to add a layer of trust to TLS/SSL certificates used for ecommerce and secure access to websites.

CIRA also rolled out an updated FAQ page on DNSSEC (thanks, CIRA, for the link to our work here!) and already has three registrars/DNS hosting providers who will offer DNSSEC-secured .CA domain names.

You may recall that CIRA first made DNSSEC available for .CA domains back in early 2013. However, it was still a manual process to get your signed .CA domain linked in to the global “chain of trust” for DNSSEC.  With this announcement yesterday CIRA has now removed that manual process and made it easy for registrars to upload the necessary DS records. Now they just need more of the .CA registrars to support DNSSEC. (See our page about DNSSEC and registrars for an overview of the process.)

Congrats to the team at CIRA for making this happen!

P.S. If you want to get started with making our domain more secure, visit our “Start Here” pages to learn more about DNSSEC.

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

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