FINAL VERSION TO BE SUBMITTED IF RATIFIED
The final version to be submitted, if the draft is ratified, will be placed here by upon completion of the vote.
FINAL DRAFT VERSION TO BE VOTED UPON BY THE ALAC
The final draft version to be voted upon by the ALAC will be placed here before the vote is to begin.
FIRST DRAFT SUBMITTED
The first draft submitted will be placed here before the call for comments begins.
The ALAC is pleased to have the opportunity to comment on the “Plan to Restart the Root KSK Rollover Process”.
DNSSEC changes the nature of the most decentralized service of the Internet, the DNS, fundamentally. It transforms a lightweight "lookup table" into a trustworthy database. It's trust is made up of two important fragments: solid cryptography implementations and transparent operations.
DNSSEC anchors the zone trust by hopping the delegation hierarchy backwards. But this process does terminate at the root. Implementing the trust for the root itself is incredible hard, ultimately it's not a technical problem at all. At this point, the trust (KSK) information needs to be put in the hands of countless network operators all over the world. This task is attributed to ICANN. AtLarge has to do it's own outreach on this subject using it's own distributed structure.
Cryptographic elements always have a lifetime, if they are keys or algorithms. It is good operational practice to change the keys regularly in order update the material and to ensure, that all processes are still in place. Changes of algorithms require a working key change process. Therefore the important root keys (where all the trust is rooted) need to be changed, too.
During the preparations of the rollover, various issues arose especially from embedded and operator-less devices. Efforts were made to estimate the impact of an KSK change for affected user groups. But all the data is still vague.
The proposed plan is to schedule the rollover for October this year, missing two possible earlier dates. The gained time should be used for intensify the communication with the network operator crowd out there. Waiting for new protocols to be deployed in order to guess more accurately is not an option. So the communication should concentrate on preparation check lists and post-rollover recovery guides for validating recursors.
ALAC supports this plan: Shifting the schedule by exactly one year makes is much more easy for outsiders to keep in time with the activities. April is clearly to short for the necessary communication. Starting in July will collide with holiday breaks in several countries. Because we depend on the operators, the October date is more appropriate in terms of workload and memorizing the important dates.
The rise of IoT starts to create swamps of non updateable network devices. If the KSK rollover is further delayed, more and more such devices will be deployed, all of them unable to deal with an upcoming KSK change. The only chance to get those developers and companies on board is to rollover the KSK. Regularly.
