Seven People Have Been Entrusted With The Keys To The Internet

[Muffin Man]

Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide

Seven People Have Been Entrusted With The Keys To The Internet

These smart cards are the actual keys to the Internet. There are seven of them and they hold the power to restarting the world wide web "in the event of a catastrophic event."

The basic idea is that in the event of an Internet catastrophe, the DNSSEC (domain name system security) could be damaged or compromised and we'd be left without a way to verify if a URL is pointing to the correct website. That's when the holders of these smart cards would be called into action:

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 everything once again.

A minimum of five people is needed because each of the smart cards contains only a fraction of the recovery key necessary to set things right again. This means that no single person will hold all the power to resetting our little cyber world.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

bah, if "the system" goes down then the USA might be in trouble but we'd be fine, as would the rest of the world.

 

[overlord20]

Its still cool... Governments would be f'ed

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

If a such thing happened, the economy would pretty much come to a stand still, governments would be screwed, and so on... I just wonder if this is legit, and how it actually works :3

 

[Apokalipse]

You could always connect to sites by IP instead of domain name.
Or have your router resolve DNS or something.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Yes you could, but you would have to already have that IP logged somewhere or know it in order to visit sites.

There are a lot of sites I do know by IP address, but, for the majority, it just won't happen.

 

[Apokalipse]

my Asus RT-N16 has Tomato firmware (which includes dnsmasq) and 128MB RAM, most of which isn't being used.
Maybe I can use it as a local DNS - I might have to use a USB thumb drive for permanent storage (for whenever it needs to reboot), which is possible since it has two USB ports.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

My netgear does basic logging of website IP addresses, but that tends to fill up and it purges the old data rather quickly....

 

[Harper]

Re: "He who controls the spice controls the universe!"

Considering what we use the internet for, we are talking about a lot of power in the palm of some one's hands (or back wallet)

 

[Slaymate]

I want my key, yesterday