Saturday, February 28, 2009

DNSsec for .gov


Already some time ago that Dan Kaminsky published his exploit on DNS, by far this was one of the most shocking events for DNS admins in a long time. For those who like to understand the exploit found by Dan Kaminsky, there is a excelent guide on unixwiz.net which is a very good introduction about the DNS exploit.

To tighten the security the administrators of a .gov domain are now told to implement DNSsec to make sure the .gov domain servers will be more secure. Besides that tightening your security is always a good plan this will also be a boost for the DNSsec project. To get a good view on DNSsec you can review the video below which is a very fast introduction on DNSsec.



In very very short, the steps to create keys for DNSsec on a Linux BIND server are noted below. However, this is a very very short guide and it has a lot of open spots. You might want to look arround to find more details. I might even write a more detailed guide on this, however, for now you will have to do with this.

- Make sure you are running at least BIND 9.3, version 9.3 is the first version where you can sign your zones.
- Review your named.conf file and make sure that dnssec-enable is set to yes.
- Next, create a key for your zone, a ZSK key, (Zone Sign Key): dnssec-keygen -a RSASHA1 -b 1024 -n ZONE somedomain.com
- Create a key to sign your ZSK key: dnssec-keygen -a RSASHA1 -b 2048 -n ZONE -f KSK somedomain.com

To get all up and running you have to take some more steps, however, in this post I only want to show you how to create your keys needed for DNSsec.

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