CIO Sessions: Verisign CTO on building a new Internet
Ken Silva, CTO of Verisign, recently sat down with me to talk security, building a network, domain names and trying to out-innovate hackers. I also give him a proverbial white board to design a new Internet.
Here's what Silva would do with a new Internet from scratch (transcript):
I think I would embed some security into the protocols themselves. Today the network itself provides zero security. There is no security in the network, virtually every packet is passed and pushed. So by embedding some security into the protocols—and some of that was thought of when IP version 6 was developed, but trying to retrofit that on top of the existing infrastructure is going to be a challenge—so I think that many of the protocols themselves would have to have some security embedded in them. And the second thing is that passwords as we know them today would not exist. They’ve actually been obsolete for more than a decade.
We also talked about embedding identity management into the Internet too and prodding the private sector with incentives to build out a new Internet. The larger question is how this newfangled Internet would be built. According to Silva you'd develop a new Internet separately and then effectively cut over to it at some future date.
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