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An Overview of the Status of DNS and HTTP Security Services in Higher Education Institutions in Portugal

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Science and Technologies for Smart Cities (SmartCity 360 2021)

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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.

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References

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Acknowledgments

This work was developed in the context of a project in the Computer Networks and Systems Engineering graduation at the Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Portugal, and it was partially supported by the Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), within project “Cybers SeC IP” (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000044).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, 4900-347, Viana do Castelo, Portugal

    Nuno Felgueiras & Pedro Pinto

  2. ISMAI, 4475-690 Maia, and INESC TEC, 4200-465, Porto, Portugal

    Pedro Pinto

Authors
  1. Nuno Felgueiras
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  2. Pedro Pinto
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pedro Pinto .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Viana do Castelo, Portugal

    Sara Paiva

  2. Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    Xuejun Li

  3. Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Viana do Castelo, Portugal

    Sérgio Ivan Lopes

  4. SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India

    Nishu Gupta

  5. Howard University, Washington, DC, USA

    Danda B. Rawat

  6. Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham, UK

    Asma Patel

  7. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Hamid Reza Karimi 

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Felgueiras, N., Pinto, P. (2022). An Overview of the Status of DNS and HTTP Security Services in Higher Education Institutions in Portugal. In: Paiva, S., et al. Science and Technologies for Smart Cities. SmartCity 360 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 442. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06371-8_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06371-8_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06370-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06371-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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