ICANN's tech chief says the internet's address system may need quantum-proofing in three to five years, not ten, so work on it is speeding up.
The group that helps run the internet's address book is moving faster to protect it from future quantum computers. John Crain, chief technology officer at ICANN, told The Register that the deadline now looks closer than he once thought. Years ago he would have said ten years. Now he says it is probably not ten.
The address book is the Domain Name System, or DNS. It turns a web name into the numbers computers use to find a site. A security layer called DNSSEC checks that those answers are genuine. Quantum computers are a new kind of machine that could one day break today's common encryption. That would put DNSSEC at risk.
Crain said some predictions have such computers arriving around the turn of the decade. He said he does not know if the target is three years or five. ICANN, the IETF and other internet bodies have begun early work, and Crain said, "We're going to ramp up the speed of development."
One fix is larger security keys that a quantum computer would struggle to crack. But larger keys mean larger DNS messages. DNS prefers to send each answer in a single small message, called UDP. Bigger answers may need to be split across several TCP packets, a different way of sending data. Crain said preparing for that will take a few years.
The material does not describe any step readers need to take. It also gives no firm date for when the upgrade will be ready. Crain said the internet is probably a few years away from rolling it out in a predictable way.
Nothing is needed from you now, but internet bodies are treating quantum-safe DNS as a job for the next few years, not the next decade.
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