Internet governance bodies are likely to accelerate work to prepare the domain name system (DNS) so it can remain secure once quantum computers can challenge conventional encryption. John Crain, ICANN’s chief technology officer, last week told The Register that he is aware of efforts within the organization, and at other internet governance bodies, to consider what happens once commercially available quantum computers become capable of easily deciphering encrypted information. Those machines theoretically pose a risk to DNSSEC, the Domain Name System Security Extensions that adapt PKI to the job of verifying the veracity of DNS records. The CTO said he’s aware of predictions that such computers could come online “at the turn of the decade” and that he has therefore changed his view of when the DNS needs to be made quantum safe. “If you asked me years ago, I would have said we probably need to be ready in ten years,” Crain said. “Now, maybe it’s less than that. I don’t know if it’s three years or five, but it’s probably not ten”. One way to quantum-proof DNSSEC is to use larger keys that even a quantum computer will struggle to crack. Doing so, however, runs into message size limits in the DNS. “If we go for larger key sizes, that means larger zones, larger packets, larger responses,” Crain said. It can also mean traffic being carried by multiple TCP packets, instead of the single UDP messages DNS prefers. Crain said ICANN, the IETF, and other internet governance bodies are aware of this challenge and have begun preliminary work to address it. “Being prepared to go from UDP to TCP is going to take a few years,” he told The Register at ICANN’s annual meeting in Bali last week. “We’re probably a few years away from being able to deploy in a predictable manner.” The internet community has, however, seen that the problem is becoming more acute. “We’re going to ramp up the speed of development,” Crain said. Internet registry reform nears
At ICANN’s Bali conference, The Register also met Jia-Rong Low, in his capacity as chair of the Number Resource Organization, the peak body for the world’s five regional internet registries (RIRs), AFRINIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, and RIPE NCC. The topic of that conversation was Internet Coordination Policy 2 (ICP-2), the document that governs RIRs. In its current form, ICP-2 describes the formation of a new RIR but no other part of its operations…