February 8th, 2007
Project Titan: Verisign moves to strengthen DNS infrastructure
SAN FRANCISCO — Just days after unknown attackers launched denial-of-service attacks against the root servers that help manage the world's Internet traffic, Verisign announced the launch of a major initiative to significantly increase its daily DNS query capacity — from 400 billion queries a day currently to 4 trillion queries a day.
The new Project Titan had been in the works long before this week's attacks — which nearly took out three of the 13 Internet root servers — but it could not have come at a more sensitive time.
The grand plan, which will cost in excess of $100 million, is to increase the capabilities of VeriSign's infrastructure to manage the wild growth in Web activity (think about the demands caused by e-commerce, social networking and Web-enabled wireless devices) while getting the adjoining security benefits.
In an announcement, Verisign said it will scale its proprietary constellation of resolution systems to increase their bandwidth from over 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) to greater than 200 Gbps. In addition, by distributing its infrastructure to many more locations around the globe, the .com and .net systems will have greater redundancy and reduced latency, providing an improved experience for users by reducing bottlenecks and increasing speed.
VeriSign also plans to build new NOCs (network operations centers) in Delaware and Europe to manage Internet traffic and counter region-specific cyber attacks and threats.
The plans also call the monitoring of Internet traffic anomalies to serve as an early warning system for cyber attacks.
Verisign is the keeper of of the critical infrastructure that handles registration and resolution traffic for the .com and .net systems. It manages about 24 billion Domain Name System (DNS) queries a day and operates the "A" and "J" root servers, which serve as the central directory to route Internet traffic to other top level domains.
Ryan Naraine is a journalist and security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab. He manages Threatpost.com, a security news portal. Here is Ryan's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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