DETERMINING THE INFLUENCE OF THE NETWORK TIME PROTOCOL (NTP) ON THE DOMAIN NAME SERVICE SECURITY EXTENSION (DNSSEC) PROTOCOL

Recent hacking events against Sony Entertainment, Target, Home Depot, and bank Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) fosters a growing perception that the Internet is an insecure environment. While Internet Privacy Concerns (IPCs) continue to grow out of a general concern for personal privacy, the availability of inexpensive Internet-capable mobile devices increases the Internet of Things (IoT), a network of everyday items embedded with the ability to connect and exchange data. Domain Name Services (DNS) has been integral part of the Internet for name resolution since the beginning. Domain Name Services has several documented vulnerabilities; for example, cache poisoning. The solution adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to strengthen DNS is DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). DNS Security Extensions uses support for cryptographically signed name resolution responses. The cryptography used by DNSSEC is the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Some researchers have suggested that the time stamp used in the public certificate of the name resolution response influences DNSSEC vulnerability to a Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attack. This quantitative study determined the efficacy of using the default relative Unix epoch time stamp versus an absolute time stamp provided by the Network Time Protocol (NTP). Both a two-proportion test and Fisher’s exact test were used on a large sample size to show that there is a statistically significant better performance in security behavior when using NTP absolute time instead of the traditional relative Unix epoch time with DNSSEC

A Survey on Content Retrieval on the Decentralised Web

The control, governance, and management of the web have become increasingly centralised, resulting in security, privacy, and censorship concerns. Decentralised initiatives have emerged to address these issues, beginning with decentralised file systems. These systems have gained popularity, with major platforms serving millions of content requests daily. Complementing the file systems are decentralised search engines and name registry infrastructures, together forming the basis of a decentralised web . This survey paper analyses research trends and emerging technologies for content retrieval on the decentralised web, encompassing both academic literature and industrial projects. Several challenges hinder the realisation of a fully decentralised web. Achieving comparable performance to centralised systems without compromising decentralisation is a key challenge. Hybrid infrastructures, blending centralised components with verifiability mechanisms, show promise to improve decentralised initiatives. While decentralised file systems have seen more mature deployments, they still face challenges such as usability, performance, privacy, and content moderation. Integrating these systems with decentralised name-registries offers a potential for improved usability with human-readable and persistent names for content. Further research is needed to address security concerns in decentralised name-registries and enhance governance and crypto-economic incentive mechanisms