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The findings of several “clean slate” research projects recommend scrapping the Internet as we know it today and starting over again from scratch. Conceived as an academic tool for sharing data between trusted sources, todays Internet simply doesn’t have the inherent security safeguards required to function in a world where many data sources are anything but trustworthy.
The Internet “works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions,” said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. “It’s sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today.”
The creators of the Internet we know today never anticipated many of the features which make it less than secure, such as the relative anonymity of those using it and the explosion in use of mobile devices to connect to other computers. Those two factors alone are responsible for many of the security issues which make the current setup risky. For instance, a hacker today could log on to a network anonymously at an Internet cafe, work their mischief, then be miles away once the damage is discovered. Another unanticipated development is the rapid growth in processing power. When the Internet was first envisioned computers didn’t have the capability of handling the “computations needed for robust authentication” that will almost certainly be included in any future revamping of the system.
Though massive changes are likely to be a decade or more away, researchers envision a new system flexible enough to handle new, and as yet unforeseen, capabilities.
“Almost every assumption going into the current design of the Internet is open to reconsideration and challenge,” said Parulkar, the NSF official heading to Stanford. “Researchers may come up with wild ideas and very innovative ideas that may not have a lot to do with the current Internet.”
The full story is available from Fox News.
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