Do you have any more details on this for those who don't normally follow DNSSEC?

It is a sad story. Politics and the magic circle. If people are wondering why the major industry players have abandoned the IETF read on. This is only one example of the type, other companies have similar issues. When VeriSign bought Network Solutions one of the main opportunities we saw was to deploy DNSSEC. There is a limit to what you can achieve in the context of DNS, anyone can get a domain name without providing authentication so proving that someone is the legitimate holder of example.com does not mean you want to give them your credit card number. On the other hand it would be quite feasible to deploy a class 1 level assurance system with low cost and ubiquitous coverage. The problem with the DNSSEC specification is the NXT record that links from one signed zone to the next. In the original specification you have to create a link record for every single domain in the zone. This causes the amount of data in the zone to increase enormously. This is fine if you have a typical zone with a few hundred or thousand entries. It is a completely different matter if you are running the dotCOM zone and you have several Gb of zone data already, a contract that specifies a very highl level of reliability and a constant series of DDoS and other attacks going on (about 1000 penetration attempts per day). There is no way that the people with responsibility for running the dotCOM zone are going to deploy a system that has such an immediate effect on operations. The amount of data expands by an order of magnitude. So we proposed a fix. The original security review was performed by myself and Warwick Ford. Instead of linking between every record you only link from one secured zone to the next. This was called 'optin'. This has exactly the same security as the original proposal but the impact on deployment is much less. The cost of deployment scales with the number of people using DNSSEC. The only change in the security is that with OPTIN there is a diferent way that an attacker can perform an insertion attack, that is causing someone to believe a zone is registered when it is not. The attack is not very plausible and at the end of the day the only impact is that we are out the six bucks for the registration. Anyone can insert domains into dotCOM, just see a registrar. The objection to the idea was that this is a VeriSign problem and the WG had zero responsibility for creating a specification that was deployable by the operators of large zones which should not exist anyway. There was also a claim that there was a personality issue, that if proponents of OPTIN had adopted the correct position as a supplicant that their petition might have been considered more favorably. The evidence is against this, every time the go with the flow strategy was attempted the DNS people would call me up six months later and say 'we have been screwed again'. This was understood by virtually everyone in the DNSSEC working group. The chair disagreed. It was at this point that I discovered that the IETF is not open and not inclusive. Every time the working group agreed on OPTIN the specification would be taken on a detour. The first time for consultation in a closed committee called the DNS Directorate. To cut a long story short the plan was filibustered for three years and then after finally comming to last call. After passing last call without objection the chair scheduled two further last calls before we finally came to a result where a clear majority of the group were in favor, four fifths were either in favor or willing to allow it to go forward and two individuals were opposed. So the chair used his perogative to impose his 'consensus' on the group. The result is that OPTIN is on the experimental track, not a proposed standard as the clear consensus of the group was that it should be. This in turn means that it is far more difficult to persuade ICANN to allow deployment of the specification with its experimental status. The IETF was designed the way it is to allow a small clique to hold power while pretending to be open and inclusive. All that Nomcon gumpf is really designed to make it impossible for the nominating committee to make more than a few changes to the IESG each time arround. The result of this type of behaviour is that the IETF has practically no influence in the industry. DNSSEC and IPv6 have been 'about to deploy' for over a decade now. There is still no clue as to how IPSEC works in any application beyond VPN, which is not what it is designed for. SSL makes a better remote access VPN protocol than IPSEC, works through NAT boxes without kludges for a start. The other industry players have similar stories. The industry is taking notice of the ideas comming out of this WG. But they are not very likely to accept a standards process unless it is based on bi-weekly teleconference calls and all major decisions are subject to vote.