Passing the Torch – My Last Root DNSSEC KSK Ceremony as Crypto Officer 4

Summary

Many years ago, when I was but an infant, the first computers were connected on the ARPANET - the seminal computer network that would eventually evolve to become the Internet. Computers at the time were large and expensive; indeed the first version of NCP - the predecessor of TCP/IP - only countenanced roughly 250 computers on the network. The name (human friendly) to network address (computer friendly) mapping on this network was maintained via a "hosts file" - literally a flat file of ordered pairs, creating the connection between host (computer) name and address. So it continued as computers got less expensive and proliferated, the Network Effect caused more institutions to want to be connected to the ARPANET. TCP/IP was developed in response to this, with support for orders of magnitude more connected computers. Along the way, the military users of the network got carved off into its own network, and by the early 1980s we had the beginnings of the Internet, or a "catenet" as it was sometimes called at the time - a network of networks. Clearly, as we went from "a couple hundred computers" to "capacity for billions", a centrally managed host file wasn't going to scale, and by the early 1980s development had started on a distributed database to replace the centrally managed file. The name for this distributed database was the Domain Name System, or DNS. It's important to realize that at the time, access to the network of networks was still restricted to a chosen few - higher education, research institutions, military organizations and the military-industrial complex (ARPA, later DARPA, was, after all, an activity of the United States Department of Defense), and a few companies that were tightly associated with one or more of those constituencies. Broad public commercial access to the Internet was many years in the future. It was in this environment that the DNS sprang forth. Academics, military researchers, university students - a pretty collegial environment. Not ...