Research Article
An Overview of the Status of DNS and HTTP Security Services in Higher Education Institutions in Portugal
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-031-06371-8_30, author={Nuno Felgueiras and Pedro Pinto}, title={An Overview of the Status of DNS and HTTP Security Services in Higher Education Institutions in Portugal}, proceedings={Science and Technologies for Smart Cities. 7th EAI International Conference, SmartCity360°, Virtual Event, December 2-4, 2021, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={SMARTCITY}, year={2022}, month={6}, keywords={DNSSEC HTTP Higher education Academic Institutions SSL Security}, doi={10.1007/978-3-031-06371-8_30} }- Nuno Felgueiras
Pedro Pinto
Year: 2022
An Overview of the Status of DNS and HTTP Security Services in Higher Education Institutions in Portugal
SMARTCITY
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-06371-8_30
Abstract
Currently, there are several security-related standards and recommendations concerning Domain Name System (DNS) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) services, that are highly valuable for governments and their services, and other public or private organizations. This is also the case of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). However, since these institutions have administrative autonomy, they present different statuses and paces in the adoption of these web-related security services.
This paper presents an overview regarding the implementation of security standards and recommendations by the Portuguese HEIs. In order to collect these results, a set of scripts were developed and executed. Data were collected concerning the security of the DNS and HTTP protocols, namely, the support of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), HTTP main configurations and redirection, digital certificates, key size, algorithms and Secure Socket Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions used.
The results obtained allow to conclude that there are different progresses between HEIs. In particular, only 11.7% of HEIs support DNSSEC, 14.4% do not use any SSL certificates, 74.8% use a 2048 bits encryption key, and 81.1% use the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm. Also, 6.3% of HEIs still negotiate with the vulnerable SSLv3 version.
