Verisign

Verisign was founded in 1995 as a subsidiary of the RSA Security certification service. She obtained licenses for the RSA core cryptographic patents, and an interim non-competition agreement was concluded. The company acted as a certificate issuing organization, and initially its goal was “to build trust in the Internet and e-commerce using digital identity products and services”. By the time Symantec's certification department was sold in 2010, Verisign had issued more than 3,000,000 certificates in a wide range of fields, from financial services to retail. Thus, behind the lock icon, familiar to most users who have made financial transactions or other confidential actions via the Internet, Verisign services are most often hidden.

In 2000, Verisign acquired Network Solutions ^[7] , which operates the .com , .net, and .org gTLDs in agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN ) and the US Department of Commerce. This acquisition became the basis of Verisign's new business, the name service, which is by far the largest and most important division of the company. Verisign sold the Network Solutions (domain name registrar) unit responsible for the retail sale of domain names in 2003, while retaining the functions of the domain name register (wholesale) as a key Internet addressing business.

On August 9, 2010, Verisign completed the sale of its authentication department to Symantec for $ 1.28 billion. The package sold included SSL (Secure Socket Layer), PKI ( Public Key Infrastructure ), Verisign Trust Seal, Verisign Identity Protection (VIP), and Verisign Japan controlling interest.

Verisign includes two service companies. Naming Services deals with top-level domains and critical aspects of the Internet infrastructure, while Network Intelligence and Availabity (NIA) Services provides DDoS attacks, managed DNS, and cyber-threat reporting.

Verisign's core business is the name service division. The division manages the authoritative registries of the two most important top-level domains on the network - .com and .net . It is also the contract operator of the name registry for the top-level domains .name and .gov , as well as TLDs of the states of Cocos Islands ( .ss ) and Tuvalu ( .tv ). In addition, Verisign is the main technical contractor for the .jobs and .edu TLDs for the respective registry operators, which are non-profit organizations. As such, Verisign serves the zone files of these domains and provides hosting for the domains of these servers. Registry operators are the “wholesalers” of Internet domains, while domain name registrars engage in retail activities, working directly with consumers and registering specific addresses.

Verisign also supports two of the thirteen root DNS servers - A and J (root servers are identified by Latin letters A to M). Root servers are the top of the hierarchical domain name system on which all Internet communication is built. Verisign is also responsible for generating the internationally recognized zone root file and makes changes to it as requested by ICANN. Changes to the root zone were initially made through root server A, but now they are distributed to all thirteen servers using a special system supported by Verisign. Of the twelve root server operators, Verisign is the only company supporting more than one server. Root servers A and J work in addressing mode to any device and are not managed by any of the company's own data centers in order to increase redundancy and availability, thereby avoiding the risk of a single failure (SPOF).