It sounds like a science fiction concept. An elite group of international figures with the fate of the world in their hands. We’re not talking Voltron here, either, we’re talking real life. Paul Kane, a British businessman, is one of six people who carry around the keys necessary to restart the Internet in the event of a security failure, massive hacking attack, and/or terrorist attack.
Kane is joined by US colleague Dan Kaminsky, Canadian Norm Richie, Jiankang Yao from China,Moussa Guebre of Burkina Faso, Bevil Wooding from Trinidad and Tobago, and Ondrej Sury of the Czech Republic. It’s part of DNSSEC, or Doman Name System Security, a new security protocol overseen by ICANN that’s designed to keep hijackers from circumventing or taking over the whole of the official Internet. That’s on top of the US government’s official cyber security force.
In the event of a catastrophe, Kane and his colleagues will be called to a US military base, retina-scanned, and allowed to restart the Internet. New keys will be generated and given to the men at this time, to prevent the old keys from falling into the wrong hands or getting copied. Fascinating stuff; it’s like a nuclear football fro nerds!
Tags: Paul Kane, keys to unlock the internet, DNSSEC, ICANN, CommunityDNS, Internet security keys, keys to restart the Internet, computer security