- Rick Lamb - Senior Program Manager, ICANN: This is the biggest security upgrade to the internet in over 20 years.
- Amanda Drew - Narrator: A group of tech specialists have been summoned by Steve Crocker, one of the godfathers of the internet.
- Steve Crocker - Chair of the Board, ICANN: We discovered that there were some vulnerabilities in the basic domain name system structure that can lead to having a domain name hijacked or having someone directed to a false site and, from there, passwords can be detected and accounts can be cleaned out.
- Steve Crocker - Chair of the Board, ICANN: Work began on adding cryptographically strong signatures to every entry in the domain name system in order to make it impossible to spoof or plant false information.
- Amanda Drew - Narrator: To make sure these cryptographic codes remain secure, they are reset every three months. Three trusted experts from around the world have been summoned with three keys, keys that open these safety deposit boxes.
- Amanda Drew - Narrator: Inside are smart cards. When the three are put together, a master code can be validated which resets the system for millions of websites.
- Rick Lamb - Senior Program Manager, ICANN: We are very lucky because every one of these people are respected members of the technical community,"Technical internet community" and that's what we were doing. Just like the internet itself was formed from the bottom up, high techies from around the world.
- Amanda Drew - Narrator: A complex set of instructions is followed to make sure the system is ready to operate.
- Reem Al Assil - Syrian Human Rights Activist: And now we need to verify the KSR. This is the key step. So, this is it. When I hit "yes", it will be signed. "Hits button" There you go, thank you very much.
- [APPLAUSE]
- Amanda Drew - Narrator: These scientists want to use cryptography to make the architecture of the internet more resilient. But, for users, cryptography has another purpose. We can use it to encrypt our message content
- Jacob Appelbaum - Computer Security Researcher: So, if we want to change the way that mass surveillance is done, encryption, it turns out, is one of the ways that we do that. When we encrypt our data, we change the value that mass surveillance presents. When phone calls are end-to-end encrypted such that no-one else can decipher their content, thanks to the science of mathematics, of cryptography.
- Amanda Drew - Narrator: And those who understand surveillance from the inside agree that it's the only way to protect our communications.
- Edward Snowden - Whistleblower: The bottom line, and I've repeated this again and again, is that encryption does work. It's the defense against the dark arts of the digital realm. This is something we all need to be not only implementing but actively researching, improving on the academic level.
- Edward Snowden - Whistleblower: You encrypt your hardware and you encrypt your network communication. You're far, far more hardened than the average user. It becomes very difficult for any sort of a mass surveillance to be applied to you. You'll still be vulnerable to some targeted surveillance. If there's a warrant against you, if the NSA is after you, they're still going to get you.
- [But]
- Edward Snowden - Whistleblower: you'll be much safer
- [from]
- Edward Snowden - Whistleblower: mass surveillance, this untargeted collect it all approach.