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The collaboration between ICANN, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and VeriSign, Inc. to deploy DNSSEC in the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS) passed an important milestone today. DNSSEC information is now being served by L-Root, one of the Internet's 13 root servers, operated by ICANN.

The DNS is vitally important to the proper operation of almost all services on the Internet, and the deployment of DNSSEC in the root zone is the biggest structural improvement to the DNS to happen in twenty years. The deployment of DNSSEC is proceeding with widespread involvement of the Internet's technical community, and is being carefully staged so that any unintended consequences of the deployment can be identified and mitigated promptly.

ICANN engineers executed a maintenance procedure to introduce DNSSEC data into L-Root between 1800-2000 UTC on 27 January 2010. The maintenance was completed as planned. The reaction of the root server system as a whole to the change is being closely monitored, with root server operators performing extensive data collection to be analysed centrally. The data collection and analysis is being coordinated by DNS-OARC, the Domain Name System Operations Analysis and Research Center.

Other root server operators will execute similar maintenance procedures in the coming months. Deployment of DNSSEC is proposed to be completed in July 2010.

For more information about the deployment of DNSSEC in the root zone, including details of how to contact the deployment team, please visit http://www.root-dnssec.org/.