Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Keycard Holders; Internet Protection

Who might've thought that someone living in Canada is that well entrenched in the IT world and has amassed sufficient skills to match those of other similarly intriguingly gifted individuals as to present as one of only seven individuals world-wide seen as capable of holding the rescue-future of the Internet in their minds and experienced hands?

Seven skilled computer specialists who have been entrusted with part of a code which is capable of restoring the Internet, that core of its system controlling browsers into routers capable of identifying websites which Internet users type in with the expectation their orders will result in the required destination. Obviously, security for this core capability is tight.

Quite as obviously, greater numbers of computer-skilled individuals than ever before are moving from literate to potentially sinister purpose with the intention of throwing governments, corporations and all manner of users in between into complete panic, with the idea that they can impair the functionality of the World Wide Web.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers server facility situated in Culpeper, Virginia, must be alert constantly to the very real potential of failure in the system they oversee as malign forces seek to sow anarchic destruction of a vital instrument of communications so instrumental in enabling modern governments, their administrations, international conglomerates, financial, scientific and academic institutions to operate.

The Canadian, Norm Ritchie, a man with deep and long experience in the management of Internet names, is one of six other-identified "trusted community representatives". Each of these selected representatives having in their possession one-seventh of the code that would be instrumental in resuscitating a damaged Internet system.

There is a sister centre existing in California, to augment that facility which is placed outside the nuclear blast zone of Washington, D.C. The two facilities dedicated to the protection of the Internet servers in control of assigned names and numbers are state-of-the-art fully protected facilities with their own anti-terrorism personnel and monitors, and rapid-response security forces.

This is serious stuff. The selected individuals come from Burkina Faso, the Czech Republic, China, Trinidad and Tobago, Britain and the United States - and of course, Canada. So the protocol is that these seven individuals have a link of some kind. The control system to ensure that their keycards are synchronized is known to those in charge, and to them as well.

The formula will be operable as long as the seven key cardholders are capable of functioning, of sequentially inputting the data to restore a downed system. Do they have trusted understudies? What happens, if heaven forfend, one of them comes a cropper due to simultaneous Internet terror attacks alongside another that strikes at people takes one out?

We can only hope that the various types of scenarios that might potentially result from a catastrophic event downing systems the international community relies so heavily upon (including municipalities whose computer-driven services are so essential to people on the home front) have been thoroughly studied and solutions that are not obvious to the casual study have been reached.

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