Only seven people in the world have the keys to the Internet’. In the event of a catastrophe, the DNSSEC (domain name system security) could be damaged or compromised and we’d be unable to verify if a URL was pointing to the correct website. These seven people from Britain, U.S.A., Burkina Faso, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, China and the Czech Republic – would then be called upon to restart the World Wide Web. A minimum of five people are needed because each card contains only a fraction of the recovery key. No single person holds all the power to resetting our cyber world.
The keyholders have been meeting four times a year, twice on the east coast of the US and twice here on the west, since 2010. Gaining access to their inner sanctum isn’t easy, but last month I was invited along to watch the ceremony and meet some of the keyholders – a select group of security experts from around the world. All have long backgrounds in internet security and work for various international institutions. They were chosen for their geographical spread as well as their experience – no one country is allowed to have too many keyholders. They travel to the ceremony at their own, or their employer’s, expense.
What these men and women control is the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS. This is the internet’s version of a telephone directory – a series of registers linking web addresses to a series of numbers, called IP addresses. Without these addresses, you would need to know a long sequence of numbers for every site you wanted to visit.
Credit : The Guardian
Picture Credit : Google
