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2018 KSK Rollover Operator Preparedness Survey

3 October 2018
By

From 21 August 2018 until 14 September 2018, the ICANN organization invited over 16,000 network operators to participate in a survey regarding their preparations for the root KSK rollover. The networks chosen for the survey were those that have shown evidence of perfoming DNSSEC validation: resolvers on those networks had sent specific queries to the DNS root name servers indicative of DNSSEC validation. These networks were the focus of the survey as they need to know about the KSK rollover and be prepared ahead of time to avoid a service disruption.

Although the response rate to the survey was fairly low, around 4%, the survey prompted many subsequent interactions between the ICANN organization and the network operators who were contacted. Hundreds of operators reached out to our help desk seeking different levels of assistance. Other ICANN engagement channels became more active as well. Responses to the survey invitations were overwhelmingly positive, despite our initial concern that such outreach might be considered spam or unwanted contact.

A big number of the operators who responded to the survey were already prepared for the rollover, confirming that the ICANN org was effective in spreading awareness. Of those not yet prepared, nearly half planned to use the automated trust anchor update protocol defined as part of DNSSEC. The other half planned to update manually their trust anchor configuration. Just two operators expressed that they would discontinue DNSSEC if an outage occurred.

We were pleased with the overall response to the survey as we continue to prepare for the root KSK rollover on 11 October 2018.

Authors

Edward Lewis

Sr. Technologist