Keymasters of the Internet

A group of leaders spread across the globe have been given secret keys and are “charged with rebooting the web if it is sent into meltdown by a terror attack or mass hacking.” It’s a story full of technological intrigue: who are these keymasters and from where do they derive their authority for being responsible for the Internet? “Mr Paul Kane, chief executive of CommunityDNS, based at Bath University, was handed the key in a secret US bunker and has stored it in a safety deposit box. ‘We had to be cleared by armed guards and retina scans,’ he said. ‘We had to spend six hours in a locked room where the keys had been generated.’ … The keyholders would be called to a US base to oversee a reboot of the security system, which includes creating new keys.”