Last Thursday, on October 11, ICANN held the KSK rollover, the procedure for changing the DNS’ top cryptographic key. The KSK is one of the main cryptographic keys of the DNSSEC protocol, which is responsible for DNS data authentication. The last KSK has been in operation at the root since 2010, the year it was first signed, and ICANN has been preparing for the rollover for the past several years.
The KSK rollover was initially scheduled for October 2017, but ICANN postponed it for a year fearing that many DNS resolvers would not be ready for the rollover, which would affect a significant number of users, denying them internet access. Some believed that internet providers would leave a total of 450 million resolver end users with temporary access issues, but experts stated that only 0.04 percent of them were likely to actually experience any sort of access issues.
Throughout the last year, ICANN has been carrying out large-scale preparations for the KSK rollover and informing network operators about it. However, the concerns remained until the very last moment. The media, of course, could not stay away from something like this: for the past several weeks, there have been plenty of articles on “mass blackouts,” “a global information catastrophe” and “the internet apocalypse.”
After the rollover, the corporation held a 48-hour pause for damage assessment. Two days is the standard time for the resolver’s caching the information, so after that one can fully assess the possible changes in the DNS system operation.
That is why it is even more satisfying to say that nothing of the kind happened. All media forgot about their horrifying prophecies, and this is a case when no news is the best news. Only a few specialized media outlets remembered that the rollover actually took place. Network World, for instance, stated in its article that the rollover went off without a glitch. ICANN introduced a special KSK rollover status web page. However, not many updates have been posted there so far. The last one was made on Sunday morning; it states that after 60 hours since the rollover, there only have been a few reports of problems.
