It’s been more than a decade since ICANN provided DNSSEC deployment workshops to registries managing African country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs), but that effort is still paying off.
The latest ccTLD to join the ranks of fully DNSSEC-capable domains is Burkina Faso’s .bf domain. The Burkina Faso ccTLD is managed by ARCEP, and Burkina Faso is the 32nd African country to deploy DNSSEC at the ccTLD.
.bf joins 166 other ccTLD domains that are fully DNSSEC capable. However, 82 ccTLD domains (33% of the total) have yet to fully enable DNSSEC. Unsigned domains are more vulnerable to various kinds of attacks that could result in denial of service for domain registrants, manipulation of data, and, perhaps most worryingly, theft of authentication credentials.
Signing the domain and installing security keys in the root zone of the DNS is only a first step to more widespread DNSSEC deployment, but it’s an important one. Incentivising registrants to sign their domains is also key, as is encouraging ISPs to enable DNSSEC validation in the recursive resolvers they provide to their subscribers.
You can continue to observe the steady increase in ccTLD DNSSEC adoption and DNSSEC validation adoption via our Pulse Enabling Technologies page.
Learn more about DNSSEC
Just about every Internet communication starts with a Domain Name System (DNS) lookup. The DNS is an essential piece of Internet infrastructure that translates human-friendly names (internetsociety.org) into computer-friendly numbers (2001:41c8:20::b31a). Like many other components of the Internet, the DNS started out without any security features in a vastly different Internet landscape.
Today, security and trustworthiness are vital foundations for the ongoing evolution and growth of a robust Internet that benefits users everywhere. DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) was developed to provide an additional level of security using cryptographic techniques to validate the authenticity of DNS information.