<h2>DNSSEC: the internet's International Criminal Court?</h2><p class="byline"><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/07/dnssec_and_geo_political_implications/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/07/dnssec_and_geo_political_implications/</a></p>
<p class="byline">By <a href="http://forms.theregister.co.uk/mail_author/?story_url=/2010/05/07/dnssec_and_geo_political_implications/" title="Send email to the author">Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco</a> •
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<p class="dateline">Posted in <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/networks/">Networks</a>, 7th May 2010
23:03 GMT</p>
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<p><strong class="trailer">INET</strong> The DNSSEC protocol could have
some very interesting geo-political implications, including erosion of
the scope of state sovereign powers, according to policy and security
experts.</p>
<p>“We will have to handle the geo-political element of DNSSEC very
carefully,” explained Peter Dengate Thrush, a New Zealand patent
attorney and chairman of ICANN, at the INET conference in San Francisco.</p>
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<p>“The Internet has the capacity to dilute some aspects of
sovereignty,” he said, “and we may find that the power to rewrite
Internet traffic may need to be tempered against some other
international standard.”</p>
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<p>Dengate Thrush then referenced other examples from history where
national sovereignty has yielded to a higher international standard,
such as the Nuremberg Trials, where Nazi war criminals were tried
against a new standard of international law, and the International
Criminal Court, which can try people outside of one country’s
jurisdiction, as examples of where inter-governmental treaties can
produce a higher standard that people are held to.</p>
<p>Other experts agreed that the DNSSEC standard – which allows Internet
servers to confirm that data sent over the Internet came from a
specific source – could make it more difficult for countries that wish
to alter or censor information to do so without being noticed.</p>
<p>Jim Galvin of Afilias, an expert in DNSSEC, warned that a “split DNS”
– where a country effectively sets up its own Internet within its
borders and controls access to the global Internet - and the DNSSEC
protocol “do not match very well”. However, he said that technically it
was possible for someone at the interface of the global Internet and a
country-wide Internet to strip electronic certificates attached to data
and repackage the data with a new one. “But that’s a political issue,”
Galvin added.</p>
<p>The discussion came on the back of the news this week that the first
tests on applying DNSSEC at the “root” had been completed and were
successful. Now it is a matter of slowly rolling out the technology to
registries (such as dot-com), then registrars (such as GoDaddy) and
finally registrants (the end user).</p>
<p>Galvin explained that to be successful, DNSSEC would have to be
implemented at first at the center of the Internet and kept away from
the average consumer until it was sufficiently simple. He accepted that
this went against the usual pattern of placing Internet security systems
as close to the end-user as possible, but identified it as the only way
that the “next generation of the Internet” will be achieved.</p>
<p>Alex Deacon, the director of technology strategy at VeriSign,
confirmed that the company was working first with ICANN and the US
Department of Commerce to apply DNSSEC to the Internet’s root, with an
expansion out to dot-edu, then dot-net and finally to the dot-com
registry in the first quarter of 2011.</p>
<p>Eventually, as the security standard cascades down toward the
end-user, it will become the “cornerstone of what security will be in
future” said Galvin, and from there “will change the Internet in ways we
can not yet imagine.”</p>
<p>Whether one of those ways will be to make it harder for countries to
control or censor the content their citizens see is something we will
have to see. ®</p>
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