FSO was called to the hosting – Kommersant

The public movement “Information for All” proposes to transfer all websites of federal authorities to the gov.ru subdomain, and to appoint the administrator of the “state” domain zone, which is now the FSO, to appoint them as a single host. Most ministries and departments already use a single domain space, except for the sites of the Kremlin, the Central Bank and law enforcement agencies. The government and the State Duma have already advocated tightening the requirements for the infrastructure of state sites. Experts, however, believe that it will not be easy to implement the idea, since the FSO does not have the necessary competencies.

“Kommersant” got acquainted with the report of the public movement “Information for All” on the security of government websites. The authors propose to legislate that the websites of federal government agencies should be hosted only in the gov.ru domain zone, and its administrator (now the Federal Security Service) should also be entrusted with the functions of a hoster and a technical support operator.

The infrastructure that hosts state sites and the components necessary for their maintenance should be hosted on a hosting site that is “under the full and direct control of the state,” the authors of the document believe. Websites of government agencies should contain only official information, exclude its unauthorized modification and provide secure data exchange with users, the report says. To do this, it is proposed to tighten the requirements for sites prescribed in existing regulatory legal acts. In particular, to extend the requirement to use software from the register of domestic software to all programs, and not just visit counters.

Prior to changing the requirements of the legislation, Information for All considers it necessary that the administrators of state sites abandon implementations that are automatically downloaded from third-party resources and make local copies of them.

Most of the websites of federal authorities are already located in the gov.ru zone. But such domains are not used, in particular, by the websites of the Kremlin and the administration of the president, the government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the Central Bank. Information for All told Kommersant that they had sent copies of the report to all authorities whose websites were analyzed.

The issues of the integrity of the websites of the Russian authorities became relevant after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. Already in March 2022, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko instructed the Ministry of Digital Transformation to ensure that state sites are hosted on Russian hosting and do not download elements from third-party foreign resources. In December, members of the State Duma Committee on Security and Anti-Corruption introduced amendments providing for the creation of a list of permitted hosters for budget organizations (see Kommersant of December 14). In March, the State Duma Committee for the Protection of Competition conceptually supported the bill, but noted that the lack of clear criteria for compiling the list could lead to the emergence of monopolists.

Issues of technical support and administration of the sites of the federal authorities “are being worked out,” Kommersant was told in the office of Mr. Chernyshenko. The Ministry of Digital Development did not respond. The idea of ​​transferring the websites of federal bodies to the gov.ru zone was relevant 10–15 years ago, but now “it’s pointless to announce it,” says Ivan Begtin, director of the Information Culture NGO: “There are authorities in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tatarstan with their own infrastructure and domain system , more than 180 thousand state institutions, which cannot be transferred to the gov.ru zone.

Entrusting the FSO with the tasks of a hoster is not a very effective solution, rather, on the contrary, it makes sense to transfer the functions of the administrator of the domain zone for government websites to the Gosoblak operator (Rostelecom), adds Karen Kazaryan, head of the Internet Research Institute: “Domain zone administration is a task small scale, but hosting requires a lot of additional competencies.

Yuri Litvinenko