ICANN announces a draft plan for moving forward with the KSK Roll.

28/02/2018

ICANN has opened a formal public comment period to receive community input on a draft plan [PDF, 93 KB] to proceed with the KSK rollover project. This comment period will run until 1 April 2018 and they are eager to receive any and all comments.

The plan calls for rolling the root zone KSK on 11 October 2018 (one year later than originally planned), continuing extensive outreach to notify as many resolver operators as possible, and publishing more observations of the RFC 8145 trust anchor report data. Additional details are contained within the plan.

In addition, a session is being planned during ICANN61 in Puerto Rico, to further discuss the plan and obtain additional feedback.

The draft plan follows the posting in late December, in which the ICANN organization announced next steps in the process to resume the root KSK rollover project. They described their efforts to track down the operators of DNS resolvers that were not ready for the rollover.

Using a protocol described in RFC 8145, these problematic resolvers had reported to the root servers a trust anchor configuration with only the current KSK (known as KSK-2010) and not the newer KSK (known as KSK-2017).

The December posting also detailed the difficulty in contacting operators, and noted that when they were able to reach an operator, they learned that there were a variety of causes for the resolver’s lagging configuration.

The bottom line is that these findings did not afford much clarity as to the next steps for mitigating specific causes nor did they afford any guidance for appropriate messaging. Faced with this situation, ICANN announced their intention to solicit input from the community on acceptable criteria for proceeding with the root KSK roll.

Since that posting in December, a robust community discussion ensued between interested community members. There was agreement during these discussions that there is no way to accurately measure the number of users who would be affected by rolling the root KSK, even though there was a belief that better measurements may become available for future KSK rollovers.

The consensus of those involved in the discussions was that the ICANN org should proceed with rolling the root zone KSK in a timely fashion while continuing outreach to ensure that the word of the rollover reach as wide an audience as possible.

ICANN looks forward to continuing to work with the community to roll the root zone KSK.