Elvis Montero

I secure. You secure.

Let’s face it: the Internet isn’t what it used to be. As more and more facets of our daily lives move onto the digital realm, security and safety immediately become pressing matters. Thus, the logical question, as appropriately posed by New York Times correspondent John Markoff, is: Do We Need a New Internet?

The Internet’s original designers never foresaw that the academic and military research network they created would one day bear the burden of carrying all the world’s communications and commerce. There was no one central control point and its designers wanted to make it possible for every network to exchange data with every other network. Little attention was given to security. Since then, there have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect.

“In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago,” said Eugene Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University and a pioneering Internet security researcher, “because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.”

The answer, however, is not a straightforward “Yes” or “No”. The reality is we desperately need a secure Internet. Nevertheless, a massive overhaul or rewrite of everything the Internet represents would conceivably entail a significant financial investment. Interestingly, Mr Markoff also informs us about a possible solution already in the works:

At Stanford, where the software protocols for original Internet were designed, researchers are creating a system to make it possible to slide a more advanced network quietly underneath today’s Internet. By the end of the summer it will be running on eight campus networks around the country.

The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users.

The Stanford Clean Slate project won’t by itself solve all the main security issues of the Internet, but it will equip software and hardware designers with a toolkit to make security features a more integral part of the network and ultimately give law enforcement officials more effective ways of tracking criminals through cyberspace. That alone may provide a deterrent.

Standford’s Clean Slate project seems to be a good fit. Their à-la-OSI approach could precisely be what the doctor prescribed. The program’s goals are markedly ambitious:

We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and ‘backward-compatible’ style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network’s ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized by two research questions: “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?”, and “How should the Internet look in 15 years?”

Evidently, an expeditious, economic solution is required. I just hope we get it sooner rather than later. Or, just as our little fellow below, we’ll all have to take matters into our own hands.

Got online protection?

Source: Mikael Albrecht

With such an innovative formula, who needs encryption anymore?