James Ball<\/strong><\/p>\n In a nondescript industrial estate in El Segundo, a\u00a0boxy suburb in northern Los Angeles just a\u00a0mile or two from LAX international airport, 20 people wait in a windowless canteen for a\u00a0ceremony to begin. Outside, the sun is shining on an unseasonably warm February day; inside, the only light comes from the glare of halogen bulbs.<\/p>\n There is a strange mix of accents \u2014 predominantly American, but smatterings of Swedish, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese can be heard around the room, as men and women (but mostly men) chat over pepperoni pizza and 75-cent vending machine soda. In the corner, an Asteroids arcade machine blares out tinny music and flashing lights.<\/p>\n It might be a fairly typical office scene, were it not for the extraordinary security procedures that everyone in this room has had to complete just to get here, the sort of measures normally reserved for nuclear launch codes or presidential visits. The reason we are all here sounds like the stuff of science fiction, or the plot of a new Tom Cruise franchise: the ceremony we are about to witness sees the coming together of a group of people, from all over the world, who each hold a key to theinternet<\/a>. Together, their keys create a master key, which in turn controls one of the central security measures at the core of the web. Rumours about the power of these keyholders abound: could their key switch off the internet? Or, if someone somehow managed to bring the whole system down, could they turn it on again?<\/p>\n The keyholders have been meeting four times a\u00a0year, twice on the east coast of the US and twice here on the west, since 2010. Gaining access to their inner sanctum isn’t easy, but last month I\u00a0was invited along to watch the ceremony and meet some of the keyholders \u2014 a select group of security experts from around the world. All have long backgrounds in internet security and work for various international institutions. They were chosen for their geographical spread as well as their experience \u2014 no one country is allowed to have too many keyholders. They travel to the ceremony at their own, or their employer’s, expense.<\/p>\n What these men and women control is the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS. This is the internet’s version of a\u00a0telephone directory \u2014 a series of registers linking web addresses to a series of numbers, called IP addresses. Without these addresses, you would need to know a long sequence of numbers for every site you wanted to visit. To get to the Guardian, for instance, you’d have to enter “77.91.251.10” instead of\u00a0theguardian.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n The master key is part of a new global effort to make the whole domain name system secure and the internet safer: every time the keyholders meet, they are verifying that each entry in these online “phone books” is authentic. This prevents a\u00a0proliferation of fake web addresses which could lead people to malicious sites, used to hack computers or steal credit card details.<\/p>\n The east and west coast ceremonies each have seven keyholders, with a further seven people around the world who could access a last-resort measure to reconstruct the system if something calamitous were to happen. Each of the 14 primary keyholders owns a traditional metal key to a\u00a0safety deposit box, which in turn contains a\u00a0smartcard, which in turn activates a machine that creates a\u00a0new master key. The backup keyholders have something a bit different: smartcards that contain a fragment of code needed to build a\u00a0replacement key-generating machine. Once a\u00a0year, these shadow holders send the organisation that runs the system \u2014 the\u00a0Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers<\/a>\u00a0(Icann) \u2014 a\u00a0photograph of themselves with that day’s newspaper and their key, to verify that all is well.<\/p>\n The fact that the US-based, not-for-profit organisation Icann \u2014 rather than a government or an international body \u2014 has one of the biggest jobs in maintaining global internet security has inevitably come in for criticism. Today’s occasionally over-the-top ceremony (streamed live on Icann’s website) is intended to prove how seriously they are taking this responsibility. It’s one part\u00a0The Matrix<\/a>\u00a0(the tech and security stuff) to two parts\u00a0The Office<\/a>\u00a0(pretty much everything else).<\/p>\n