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Coronavirus could cause “high risk of widespread outages”, ICANN says

Kevin Murphy, April 21, 2020, 18:30:13 (UTC), Domain Tech

There’s a “high risk of widespread outages” in the DNS if ICANN can’t get enough people in the same room for its next root DNSSEC ceremony because of the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s according to ICANN’s own board of directors, which yesterday published a contingency plan that — in the worst case scenario — could see parts of the internet come to a screeching halt in July.

The problem is with the elaborate “ceremonies” that ICANN and its IANA/PTI unit uses to make sure the internet can support DNSSEC — the secure version of the DNS protocol — all the way from the root servers down.

Every quarter, ICANN, Verisign and a select few “Trusted Community Representatives” from all over the world meet in person at one of two secure US-based facilities to generate the public Zone Signing Keys for the root.

In addition to the complex cryptographic stuff happening in the computers, there’s a shedload of physical security, such as retinal scans, PIN-based locks, and reinforced walls.

And the “secret key-holders”, memorably fictionalized in a US spy drama a few years ago, actually have physical keys that they must bring to these ceremonies.

The events are broadcast live and archived on YouTube, where they typically get anything from a few hundred to a few thousand views.

Obviously, with the key-holders dotted all over the globe and most under some form of coronavirus-related lockdown, getting a quorum into the same facility at the same time — originally, Culpeper, Virginia on April 23 — isn’t going to be possible.

So IANA has made the decision to instead move the ceremony to the facility in El Segundo, California, within easy driving distance of ICANN’s headquarters, and have it carried out almost entirely by ICANN staff, wrapped in personal protective equipment and keeping their distance from each other.

The TCRs for El Segundo live in Mauritius, Spain, Russia, Tanzania, Uruguay and on the east-coast of the US, according to ICANN.

Four of these key-holders have mailed their keys to different IANA staff “wrapped in opaque material” and sealed in “tamper-evident bags”. These IANA employees will stand in for the TCRs, who will be watching remotely to verify that nothing fishy is going on.

Verisign and the independent auditors will also be watching remotely.

That’s the current plan, anyway, and I’ve no reason to believe it won’t go ahead, but ICANN’s new contingency plans do provide four alternatives.

It’s already discarded the first two options, so if the current, third, plan for the ceremony can’t go ahead before June 19 for some reason, all that would be left is the nuclear option.

Option D: Suspend signing of the DNS root zone

This is the final option if there is no conceivable way to activate the KSK and perform signing operations. There would need to be a massive education campaign at short notice to have resolver operators disable DNSSEC validation. There is a high risk of widespread outages as it is not possible to ensure global implementation, and high risk this will fatally compromise trust in DNSSEC in general as a technology.

This is considered highly unlikely, but nonetheless the final option. Without exercising the option, in the absence of a successful key signing ceremony, DNSSEC validation would be unsuccessful starting in July 2020.

The reason for this scenario is that DNSSEC keys have a finite time-to-live and after that period expires they stop functioning, which means anyone validating DNSSEC on their network may well stop resolving the signed zones.

ICANN typically generates the keys one quarter in advance, so the current key expires at the start of July.

However, the planned April 23 ceremony will generate three quarters worth of keys in advance, so the root should be good until the end of March 2021, assuming everything goes according to plan.

Clearly, the idea that half the planet might be on the verge of lockdown wasn’t taken into consideration on February 12, the last ceremony, when ICANN’s biggest problem was that it couldn’t get into one of its safes.

If you’re interested in more about the ceremony and the coronavirus-related changes, info can be found here.

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Comments (2)

  1. Acro says:
    April 21, 2020 at 8:41 pm

    What an elite group of privileged bureaucrats!

    Reply
  2. James Gannon says:
    April 23, 2020 at 9:00 pm

    Went off without a hitch for the record

    Reply

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