Verisign discloses Verisign Informed, applies for .pki top level domain
Fresh security product to provide current certificate status information.
Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) disclosed its long-awaited fresh security product today, along with its application for the .pki top level domain.
Verisign Informed addresses what the firm calls stale trust, where decisions are based on out-of-date certificate information.
Systems can rely on old or cached information regarding whether a certificate is still valid. Verisign Informed is essentially a certificate status service that provides current information regarding whether a certificate has been revoked.
Ahead of trusting a certificate, a system can query Verisign Informed for its current status. Verisign returns a cryptographically signed OCSP response indicating the certificate’s status.
Verisign states existing certificate validity data can be out of date. As AI decreases the time to exploitation, systems need the most up-to-date information ahead of relying on a certificate. Its service is designed to minimize the window in which a compromised certificate might still be trusted.
It leverages Verisign’s reputation for handling sizable-scale lookup systems. Its infrastructure now handles regarding 8.6 million DNS transactions a second.
The product is in a limited beta, and Verisign plans to launch it generally in the first half of 2027.
Verisign also disclosed that it applied for the .pki top level domain. It states it sees .pki as a potentially useful gTLD within PKI usage scenarios.
The firm previously disclosed it was applying to be a registry service provider in case it applied for fresh TLDs. On Wednesday, ICANN will reveal all TLD applications.
