Area served Worldwide Founded 1994 Type of business Network Engineering | Website www.isc.org Number of employees 20 | |
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Focus DNS, BIND, Internet, Kea Location Redwood City, California, U.S. Key people Jeff Osborn (President) Formerly called Internet Software Consortium Founders Paul Vixie, Rick Adams, Carl Malamud Similar Réseaux IP Européens Network, Linux Professional Institute, Asia‑Pacific Network Informatio, CompTIA, American Registry for Internet N Profiles | ||
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., also known as ISC, is a Delaware-registered, 501(c)(3) corporation that supports the infrastructure of the universal, self-organizing Internet by developing and maintaining core production-quality software, protocols, and operations. ISC has developed several key Internet technologies that enable the global Internet, including: BIND, ISC DHCP and Kea. Other software projects no longer in active development include OpenReg, and ISC AFTR (an implementation of an IPv4/IPv6 transition protocol based on Dual-Stack Lite).
Contents
- History
- Open Source
- ISC license
- DNS root server
- Usenet moderators list
- Internet Domain Survey
- Controversies
- References
ISC operates one of the 13 global authoritative DNS root servers, F-root.
Over the years a number of additional software systems were operated under ISC (for example: INN and Lynx) to better support the Internet's infrastructure. ISC also expanded their operational activities to include Internet hosting facilities for other open-source projects such as NetBSD, XFree86, kernel.org, secondary name-service (SNS) for more than 50 top-level domains, and a DNS OARC (Operations, Analysis and Research Center) for monitoring and reporting of the Internet's DNS.
ISC is actively involved in community design process; it authors and participates in the development of the IETF standards, including the production of managed open-source software used as a reference implementation of the DNS.
History
Originally the company was founded as the Internet Software Consortium, Inc. The founders included Paul Vixie, Rick Adams and Carl Malamud. The intention of this corporation was to be to continue the development of BIND software. The founders believed that it was necessary for BIND's maintenance and development be managed and funded by an independent organization. ISC was designated as a root name server operator by IANA, originally as NS.ISC.ORG and later as F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
In January 2004, ISC reorganized under the new name Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.
In July 2013, ISC spun off the Security Business Unit to Farsight Security, Inc. a new company started by ISC founder Paul Vixie.
Open Source
ISC develops and maintains open source networking software, including BIND and two DHCP implementations, ISC DHCP and Kea. ISC also distributes INN and several older, unmaintained projects. Some aspects of its software have, in the past, been developed by developers that are commercially employed by Nominum.
ISC license
ISC developed and uses the ISC license which is functionally similar to the simplified BSD and MIT licenses. The ISC license is OpenBSD's preferred license for new code.
DNS root server
ISC operates the DNS "F" root server, the first such server to be distributed using anycast. In 2007 it was announced that ISC and ICANN would sign an agreement regarding the operation of F, the first such agreement made between ICANN and a root-server operator.
Usenet moderators list
ISC maintains and publishes (on ftp.isc.org) the central Usenet moderators list and relays for moderated groups so individual server operators don't have to track moderator changes.
Internet Domain Survey
The Internet Domain Survey searches the Domain Name System (DNS) to discover every Internet host. The survey began when only a few hundred hosts were Internet linked. The earliest published reports dated 1993 were performed by Network Wizards owner Mark K. Lottor. The Internet host count was 1,313,000 in January 1993 and 1,062,660,523 in the latest January 2017 survey.
ISC is the current sponsor and publisher with technical operations subcontracted to Network Wizards.
Controversies
In 2017, ISC joined the Market for zero-day exploits. They sell the early notification of critical security vulnerabilities, before the vulnerability is made public. Now, intelligence agencies and cyber criminals can buy vulnerabilities without accessing darknet.