7 Keys Scattered Across the Globe Protect Your Internet

ICANN internet security Paul Kane Recovery Key Seven Keys Trusted Community Representatives

by Michael Suen | 6:02 pm, July 27th, 2010

Seven sages across the land hold the Medallions which can rebuild the world … and no, we’re not referring to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Surprisingly, we’re talking about real life: The BBC reports that Paul Kane, CEO of UK-based domain name sever company CommunityDNS, has been named one of the keepers of the seven magical keys (and by “magical keys,” we mean “non-magical keycards”) scattered around the world that, when used together, can reboot the entire World Wide Web.

Mr. Kane will be the key holder of Western Europe. Moria and Rivendell, we suspect, will also have their respective key bearers.

If the Internet’s DNS were to somehow collapse, not only would you not be able to access your beloved Geekosystem home page, but the world economy and social infrastructure would likely be devastated too.

Well, DNS watchdog ICANN–who has been busy improving our porn sites and also recently implicated by various news outlets for helping the U.S. government take down various movie streaming sites–has now created a fallback system.

In the situation that there is an catastrophic security breach–say, a terrorist cyberattack– at least five of the seven Trusted Community Representatives (TCRs) would be required to travel to the United States in order to combine their respective “encrypted cryptographic fragment[s] of the Recovery Key for the DNSSEC signing Key used to sign the ROOT Zone.” According to the New Scientist, Kane said he plans to store the smartcard in a “tamper-proof bag” in “a secure deposit box.”

Well, thanks for giving even that away, Kane! Ganondorf’s probably researching security deposit boxes located in England as we speak.

The guardians of the seven Horcruxes keys are as follows:

Paul Kane (Great Britain)
Dan Kaminsky (United States)
Jiankang Yao (China)
Moussa Guebre (Burkina Faso)
Bevil Wooding (Trinidad and Tobago)
Ondrej Sury (Czech Republic)
Norm Ritchie (Canada)

Let’s hope the others are warier than Mr. Kane!

(via Geekologie)

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1 comment

aidriiyan says:

July 28, 2010 at 11:35 am

this is nice.

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