This is a great case of knowledge would be good if people were really aware of the problem and the solution. We all want security on the internet. A solution has been created. Some internet providers haven’t updated to the new security protocols, so now there is a hold on starting the new security. If we were aware of who hasn’t, we could vote with our wallets.
A multi-year effort to update the internet’s overall security has been put on hold just days before it was due to be introduced, over fears that as many as 60 million people could be forced offline.
DNS overseer ICANN announced on Thursday it had postponed the rollout of a new root zone “key signing key” (KSK) used to secure the internet’s foundational servers after it received fresh information that indicated its deployment would be more problematic than expected.
The KSK acts as an anchor for the global internet: it builds a chain of trust from the root zone down through the whole domain name system so that DNS resolvers – software that turns addresses like theregister.com into network addresses like 159.100.131.165 – can verify they’re getting good valid results to their queries.
Internet engineers knew that introducing a longer and hence more secure public-private key pair would cause some old and poorly configured systems to throw out errors, and so have embarked on a slow rollout that started back in May 2016. Read more here.