August 2023 | Here's what's happened in the last month.
How Resilient are E-Gov Services?
DNS services maintaining e-government (e-gov) domains should have maximum levels of redundancy to withstand disruption or stress.
Researchers from the University of Twente, The National Cyber Security Center of the Netherlands and SIDN Labs published a peer-reviewed study comparing the resiliency and redundancy of e-gov domains for the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.
The study found that:
Around 40% of the Netherlands, Sweden, and Swiss e-gov domain names have a single DNS provider (over IPv4), while 82% of US e-gov domains have a single provider.
Around 10% of the Netherlands domain names are announced by a single prefix. This figure increases to around 20% for the US and Sweden and to nearly one-third for Swiss e-gov domain names. If the DNS servers of an e-gov domain name share the same routing prefixes, they are announced from the same server location(s), which means they are all at risk of going down when something happens to that server.
More than 90% of Switzerland's e-gov domains e-gov domains are on an authoritative server under a single TLD, .ch. Best current practice recommends announcing domain names using more than one TLD, for example, health.ch and health.com.
Fewer than 3% of Switzerland’s e-gov domains have at least one anycast server (see figure below). Sweden has 12%, the Netherlands has around 20%, while the US performs significantly better, with around 58% of its e-gov domains on anycast services. IP anycast is a networking method to announce the same IP prefix from multiple locations. Many content and infrastructure services on the Internet use anycast routing to improve service availability and performance and reduce the risk of service disruption if one location goes down.
Studies like these help validate the data the IRI and other measurement projects rely on to analyze the resilience of these services and the Internet. However, as the authors of this study disclosed, obtaining the data for these metrics for each country is difficult as many use their own ccTLDs for e-gov domains, and there is no public list of e-gov domains.
Gabon, 26 Aug - Ongoing: The government ordered a public curfew and for the Internet to be shut down in Gabon following presidential, legislative, and local elections.
India, 31 July - Ongoing: Authorities ordered mobile Internet services to be suspended in the Nuh district of Haryana after communal clashes.
Senegal, 31 Jul - 7 Aug: Government authorities ordered mobile Internet services to be “temporarily suspended” following the arrest of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko.
Syrian Arab Republic, 25 Jun - 23 Aug: The Syrian government ordered 9 exam-related shutdowns for August. The country has experienced 11 such shutdowns since June.
Iraq, 1 Jun - 24 Aug: The government of Iraq ordered another set exam-related shutdowns for August, this time to curb cheating during the year nine examination period. Each shutdown occurred on the morning of a planed national curriculum for between 2-4 hours. Iraq has ordered 33 exam-related shutdowns since 1 June.
India, 3 May - Ongoing: On 25 July, the government ordered a partial lift on the enforced Internet shutdown in the Indian state of Manipur.
