The Emerging Future Internet

Cybersecurity is on the front burner of Internet concerns for both users and policy makers thanks to relentless, high profile attacks. We’ve all heard about data breaches at Sony, OPM, Ashley Madison, Experian/T-Mobile, CVS, and the IRS, but Hackmageddon lists 30 data breaches in the month of July alone. While some of our brightest security stars are working on problem, they’re essentially bailing water. Is something wrong with the boat? The Internet we have today is the offspring of a research project whose Statement of Work called for a means of exchanging large data sets within a trusted community of researchers and academics, but that’s not what we need today. One of the more radical ideas for dealing with security and a host of other issues affecting the Internet is to redesign the Internet’s architecture. The argument for a new Internet architecture is made very well in John Day’s Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals, which argues that the Internet went down the wrong path when TCP was divided from IP and the INWG 96 consensus design was rejected by ARPA.