Posted on 07/28/2010 2:08:07 AM PDT by lbryce
You may have heard the rumor that swirled briefly last month about an Internet “kill switch” that could power down the Web in the case of a critical cyber attack. Those rumors turned out to be largely overblown, but it turns out there are now seven individuals out there holding keys to the Internet. In the aftermath of a cataclysmic cyber attack, these members of a “chain of trust” will be responsible for rebooting the Web.
The seven members of this holy order of cyber security hail from around the world and recently received their keys while locked deep in a U.S. bunker. But the team isn’t military in nature. The Internet safety program is overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit watchdog group that has access to a security system designed to protect users from cyber fraud and cyber attacks.
Part of ICANN’s security scheme is the Domain Name System Security, a security protocol that ensures Web sites are registered and “signed” (this is the security measure built into the Web that ensures when you go to a URL you arrive at a real site and not an identical pirate site). Most major servers are a part of DNSSEC, as it's known, and during a major international attack, the system might sever connections between important servers to contain the damage.
A minimum of five of the seven keyholders – one each from Britain, the U.S., Burkina Faso, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, China, and the Czech Republic – would have to converge at a U.S. base with their keys to restart the system and connect eveything once again. We’re imagining a large medieval chamber filled with techno-religious imagery where these knights cyber must simultaneously turn hybrid thumb drive/skeleton keys
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the land of Mordor Obama where the shadows lie.
prisoner6
Interesting, but when the internet get “broke”, I don’t believe these 7 people will be able to restart it. It will take a lot more than them.
Guess they won't be making their flight reservations online...
More importantly WHO was it that decided on this procedure in the first place (and under what "authority" if you will gave them this decision making process as I was always under the impression that the Internet was not a monolith or controlled by any individual, group, organization or even Nation) and even more pertinent, WHO chose the representing Countries and individuals who were anointed as the "Key Holders?"
It’s not clear how this would help a case of infrastructure getting 0wn3d, such as malicious code stuck by China in router firmware.
The DNS system converts a domain name like "freerepublic.com" into an IP address like 209.157.64.200. It's like a telephone book.
If you lose a telephone book, you can still make calls. You just have to know the phone number, or have it written down somewhere else. It's the same with IP addresses. For example:
http://209.157.64.200/ will load Free Republic.
Furthermore, you don't generally use the DNS root servers directly. You use a local DNS server, who keeps its own copies of domain names and IP addresses, and it only uses the root DNS servers for new domain names and periodic updates.
If your DNS server is still working (and you trust it), you'll still be able to use the 'Net.
Now it’s seven targets holding the keys to the Internet.
/sarc
Good Lord, this sounds like a South Park episode.
Who gets the flash drive with the “Sword of a Thousand Truths”?
lol
Of course there is no mention of the fact that the Internet was inherently designed to be fault tolerant.
How to “reboot” the Internet...
Sent username “pix”
pix@10.0.0.1’s password:
Type help or ‘?’ for a list of available commands.
Internet>
Internet> en
Password: ********
Invalid password
Password: *********
Internet# reload
Mark
It WAS a SouthPark episode! They had to reboot their Linksys router!
Mark
This is old news to Alex Jones fans, sure, he's hard on the ears & eyes sometimes, but your never suprised again, kinda like running with the big dogs at the head of the pack.
"Woof, woof!"
For example, the guy from Burkina Faso is a dwarf who can lift 27 times his own weight and only needs to breath once a month. The woman from Trinidad has fingers that turn into small snakes and she can buckle a man's knees with song. The Canadian wears flannel and likes to eat pancakes. The Czech can shoot an arrow halfway around the world and can also summon lightning strikes wherever he needs them.
bttt
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