ICANN has elected Rod Beckstrom as its new chief, replacing Paul Twomey who is retiring after 6 years in the post.
Beckstrom has a strong IT security and technology background. His web site reflects a keen intellect and communications/political skills that should serve him well in this role with ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is worth visiting Rod's site and listening to some of his interviews.
I've written before about the importance of ICANN and a free internet, something the general media has failed to appreciate, with a few exceptions. Created by the Clinton Administration to move control of the Internet to a world body that was not controlled by governments or the United Nations, ICANN is incredibly important to individual freedom around the world.
Beckstrom resigned from his post as US Cybersecurity Director in March amid some controversy over funding and NSA control. He seems to be an independent thinker. I am encouraged by his security background and stated goal of understanding DNSSEC in greater depth.
The overriding weakness in Internet security is its inability to scale across organizational boundaries. The DNS is the only thing that provides that scaling. Yet without the Trust and Authentication enabled by DNSSEC we can never escape the current extremely expensive, limiting and ineffective security we have today. Dan Kaminsky, security researcher with IOActive and discoverer of the "Kaminsky Vulnerability" in the DNS over a year ago, spoke about this in a recent interview with Michael Mimoso, Editor of Information Security Magazine.
The primary challenges facing Beckstrom in his new position are political. International politics are the only remaining challenge to DNSSEC deployment now that the technical issues have been resolved. See this article by William Jackson in GCN for more on that topic. Failure to deploy DNSSEC is not an option.
I wish Rod the best of luck and success.
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