After 10 years the industry-independent Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) is embarking on a completely new BIND implementation with BIND 10. Its patrons and sponsors should ensure that the market leader in DNS implementation is more secure, flexible and highly scalable, although developers are keeping the details close to their chests at present.

Admins have always had a mixed relationship with BIND. Although it has a DNS nameserver market share of almost 75% worldwide, its configuration has proven to be somewhat tedious and difficult when it comes to high availability. ISC president and DNS maven Paul Vixie feels that this should soon change with the help of its dozen or so patrons and sponsors among domain registries. The nonprofit organization can then focus on developing BIND 10 under a BSD-like ISC license based on their financing.

Even with full details on BIND 10 missing, ISC sketched out some cornerstones of its design. One among them is that BIND 10 will support DNSSEC. Many security experts called for higher security measures as a critical Internet infrastructure for DNS after they publicized holes in the protocol.

BIND 10 should undergo some modularization to provide more interfaces, including to background query databases. It will also provide new forms of interaction with monitoring and configuration environments, enabling a closer coupling between DNS and DHCP servers to allow not only IP address but also hostname allocations. One thing where developers agree is that BIND 9 left too many opportunities for DoS attacks by dumping and exiting on the slightest error. BIND 10 will use reset-and-continue as the normal response to attacks instead.

After 10 years the industry-independent Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) is embarking on a completely new BIND implementation with BIND 10. Its patrons and sponsors should ensure that the market leader in DNS implementation is more secure, flexible and highly scalable, although developers are keeping the details close to their chests at present.