The people who run the internet’s naming system say the timeline for quantum proofing it has shortened. John Crain, chief technology officer of ICANN, told The Register at the organisation’s annual meeting in Bali last week that efforts within ICANN and other internet governance bodies to prepare the domain name system for quantum computers are likely to accelerate, and that his own estimate of when readiness is needed has moved from about ten years to perhaps three to five, against predictions that capable machines could arrive around the turn of the decade.
The technical problem is specific. DNSSEC, the security extensions that verify the authenticity of DNS records, relies on public key cryptography of the kind quantum machines are expected to challenge. One defence is larger keys, but larger keys mean larger zones, larger packets and larger responses, running into the message size limits built into DNS, which prefers single UDP messages over multi packet TCP exchanges. Crain said being prepared to move from UDP to TCP will itself take a few years, and deployment in a predictable manner is probably a few years away.
The same meeting moved on registry governance. Jia-Rong Low, chair of the Number Resource Organization, said the revised Internet Coordination Policy 2, which would govern a regional internet registry’s whole lifecycle including audit, emergency continuity and derecognition, has reached recommended draft status, with a final document hoped for by the end of 2026. ICANN research presented at the meeting also found that Category 1 top level domains, the regulated sector strings such as .bank and .doctor, have a 45 percent higher chance of being targeted for abuse than other domains, though with lower abuse volumes.