

A father knows best: Vint Cerf re-thinks the Internet in Stanford talk - yarapavan
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/february/cerf-rethinks-internet-021111.html

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tptacek
I've heard many of the "fathers of the Internet" say that security is the
biggest flaw with the architecture of the modern IPv4 Internet, but not a lot
of detail on why they think that is, or how it is they think that the
_network_ is going to mitigate the effect of billions of lines of code written
without regard for security, much of it inherently exposed to attackers.

Ten years ago, one could reasonably argue that traceability was a key Internet
security problem. A modern Internet would prevent people from launching
anonymous attacks. When I was at Arbor networks, our most interesting
competitor was a company called Asta, led in part by Stefan Savage, which had
in their intellectual heritage a thesis on stochastic traceback of DoS
attacks. Great stuff. But, as it turned out, not 3 years later the majority of
non-trivial DDoS attacks were being carried out by organized armies of
compromised machines. What's a secure Internet going to do about that problem?

I don't care about this as a practical matter. In reality, Vint Cerf's
reimagining of the Internet has little force. The market (rightfully)
determines what will be deployed. But it's a little sad to me if part of
Cerf's logic is that the End to End Argument In Systems Design has outlived
its usefulness --- that is, if he really believes we should concentrate more
security intelligence into the network, instead of keeping the Internet dumb
and insecure so people can innovate security from the edges.

~~~
wmf
What do you think about the the idea of letting hosts ask the network to drop
certain traffic upstream?

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pohl
I wasn't able to pull anything out of this article. Perhaps I read it too
quickly. Did anyone get a sense of what sort of re-thinking he has in mind?

Something content-centric, perhaps?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8> (an excellent google tech talk)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson>

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barista
Interesting. A link to the talk somewhere?

~~~
orls
The official site has it via
<http://soe.stanford.edu/alumni/cerf_lecture.html> (sadly, requires
Silverlight)

