[dns-operations] Announcing the DNS-OARC DNS Operations Trust Group

[Matt Larson]

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to announce the formation of the DNS-OARC DNS Operations
Trust Group.  This group is an evolution of a previous secure
operations mailing list and is intended to enable and encourage secure
exchange of operational information about the DNS for the purpose of
promoting and improving the security and stability of the global DNS.
New participants will be vetted by the existing membership with the
intent to produce a group with the greatest level of trust possible.
The new platform this trust group resides on has much better
mechanisms for vetting members and managing the list members, which we
believe will lead to better communication for everyone involved.

The trust group's scope is the identification, discussion, and
mitigation of anomalies, threats or incidents related to: the DNS
protocol, operational infrastructure and provisioning of the DNS, and
operations of high volume or high profile DNS authoritative servers,
caching resolvers and validators.

DNS-OARC trust group participants must be in a position to directly
affect the overall security of the DNS infrastructure through hands-on
control of infrastructure or through contributing critical security
information or wisdom.  The pool of participants may include operators
of critical DNS infrastructure, DNS security experts, technical
representatives of DNS software vendors, as well as researchers and
experts in DNS operations and members of the law enforcement
community.  Membership in DNS-OARC is not required.

The initial membership was bootstrapped by the DNS-OARC board and
comprises approximately 25 members from the various roles listed
above.  All were vouched for by the entire board.  The board also
serves as the initial steering group, which provides oversight,
guidance and arbitration of the trust group's policy and governance
issues.  The board will transition out of this role and the steering
group will be selected by the membership itself after the trust group
reaches critical mass.

If you believe you would be an appropriate member of the trust group,
you may nominate yourself for membership consideration by sending
email to dns-ops-trustgroup at dns-oarc.net.  New members will require
three positive vouches from the existing membership.  A vouch
indicates that the member personally knows and trusts the vouchee.
The intent is for the membership to be as inclusive as possible while
still preserving an atmosphere of mutual trust.

Please be aware that a nominee's not receiving an invite is not
necessarily a sign of distrust.  It could be that the nominee has not
been known long enough or widely enough to receive sufficient vouches.
This situation might change over the course of time and the nominee
may receive an invite at some point in the future.

We believe the DNS Operations Trust Group provides a much-needed venue
for critical and sensitive discussion about the global DNS, and
DNS-OARC is pleased to be able to initiate it.  We are grateful to
OPSEC Trust (ops-trust.net) for providing the infrastructure for the
group.

Matt Larson
Chairman, OARC, Inc.