The public forum at the recent ICANN-Seoul meeting included an exchange between IGP's Milton Mueller and ICANN Board member Steve Crocker concerning cryptographic algorithms used in DNSSEC and the requirement in ICANN's new gTLD application to deploy DNSSEC. Both raised points which bear repeating and further elaboration of the underlying competition issues that comes with signing the root.
IGP's Michel van Eeten, along with numerous other practitioners and experts, will participate in a workshop, Securing Cyberspace: Strategy for the Future, at the upcoming Internet Governance Forum in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt on Tuesday November 17, from 14:30-17:30 (local time, 12:30-15:30 UTC) in Room 4 (Nile Valley), you can listen to the audio feed (ch 5).
Affirming the results of a 2007 survey and consistent with numerous comments submitted in a 2009 NTIA proceeding on DNSSEC, ccTLD operators have again indicated in a new survey they want ICANN to sign the root. Their request stands in stark contrast to the June announcement made by the DoC which maintained the current root zone management arrangements and recommended Verisign sign the root zone.
The report states:
“Just like in the 2007 survey, an overwhelming majority of the respondents represents the opinion that ICANN/IANA should be the signer of the root zone. The support for ICANN/IANA has even clearly increased compared to the previous study – from 68% in 2007 to 76% in 2009.”
The Obama administration is making security a high priority. However, prioritizing security goes contrary to Internet privatization, multi-stakeholderism, civil society, and even international cooperation.
Phillip Hallam-Baker, an Internet security pioneer and most recently Principal Scientist at VeriSign, has criticized current DNSSEC root signing arrangements in his comments to the Dept of Commerce as a “profoundly destabilizing technology” for the Internet. He recommends that NTIA “require that ICANN propose a technical solution for signing the DNS root zone that is endorsed by a clear majority of the national stakeholders.”
DHS will present its 2010 budget request before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs today, including a reported $400 million to protect critical infrastructure and cyber networks from attack. $11 million of this was requested to fund DHS's Information Infrastructure Security (IIS) Program and Secure Protocol Project, including work on securing the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) and routing infrastructure. Despite the relatively small amount of funding, SPP work is intended to, and if successful could, have far reaching impact on the Internet.
IGP's Milton Mueller and Jeanette Hofmann have been invited to attend a European Commission Hearing on Internet Governance Arrangements to be held in Brussels on May 6. The agenda focuses attention on the international dimension of “security and stability” as governments continue to use the “critical infrastructure” rubric to position themselves for a stronger role. For example, it asks whether “self-regulation for critical infrastructures and services [should] be more closely monitored by governments and relevant public authorities?”
While the fight over using cryptography to protect personal communications was allegedly “won” during the late 1990s, the battle over using it to protect critical Internet resources is just heating up. News from the recent IETF in San Francisco and RANS conference in Moscow suggests that national crypto laws are now complicating efforts to secure the DNS.
Specifically, supporters of .ru have noted that while they are interested in deploying DNSSEC, there are legal and operational constraints surrounding the current crypto specs in the standard (i.e., RSA signature and SHA digest algorithms) that could make it difficult for Russian based organizations to deploy the protocol. There are now efforts being made to introduce the Russian developed GOST family of algorithms into the protocol.
[Update: An Internet-Draft on producing GOST signature and hash algorithms DNSKEY and RRSIG resource records for use in the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) has been submitted for adoption by the DNSEXT Working Group.]
Declaring Independence in Cyberspace tells the story of the struggle between governments and the global Internet community over control of the Internet registries (IANA). It offers new insights into a pressing question with profound implications: is state sovereignty the immutable foundation of global governance, or can new technological capabilities change the model?
“This is a book that needed to be written, and no one is better placed to write it than Milton Mueller. This full, rigorous account provides researchers and policymakers with a precious resource on global internet governance.”
Jan Aart Scholte, Leiden University