US government announces new measures to enhance .gov security
The US government has announced plans to enhance the security of the .gov top-level domain (TLD) by preloading it. Preloading is related to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) protocol, which encrypts the traffic between a user’s device and a website. Web browsers allow websites which have enabled HTTPs to be preloaded as HTTP Strict Transport Security records; thus, web browsers will always use HTTPS to connect users to the preloaded websites. The US government intends to automatically preload all new .gov domains starting 1 September 2020, with the long-term goal of preloading the entire .gov TLD within a few years (not possible at the moment because several .gov websites have not switched to HTTPS).
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