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David Clark: Rebuild the Internet
boarder8925 writes "David Clark, who led the development of the internet in the 1970s, is working with the National Science Foundation on a plan for a whole new infrastructure to replace today's global network. The NSF aims to put out a request for proposals in the fall for plans and designs that could lead to what Clark called a 'clean slate' internet architecture. Those designs, Clark said, could be tested on the National LambdaRail, the nationwide optical network that researchers are using to experiment with new networking technologies and applications."
"A whole new infraestructure" you say?.
We cant even start using the new ipv6 protocol. I dont think we are there yet. Try in 10 or so years.
http://securityportal.com.ar
What will the powers that be put in there to make it easy to track and control everything we do with it?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
"A super-high-speed internet could even allow people a world apart to collaborate inside elaborate 3-D virtual arenas, a process called tele-immersion."
I believe the technical term for this is MMORPG. It appears to work pretty well with our current internet.
All joking aside, I don't think anything will change any time in the near future. IPv6 is probably the most radical change the internet will see for possibly decades to come, and that can't even catch on. People are simply not going to pay to have the internet re-architected when it is working well enough as it is; why reinvent the wheel while its still rolling. Things along these lines have been proposed before, and I'm sure will be proposed again, and I'm sure that one day, the internet will eventually be rewired. However, this is still far ahead of its time.
Cars still ride on wheels, power still goes out with storms, and cell phones still lose service underground. What makes anyone think the internet is going to be any different.
I'll agree with him that Internet2 hasn't lived-up to what it should have been, and trying something completely different would be a very good idea.
However, I don't agree that the current internet is in-need of replacement. Creating TCP/IP packets requires significant processing power, and a simpler protocol would mean more devices being online, but by the time anything new becomes accepted, a $1 chip will be able to do it all.
If you want to improve the internet, put explicit congestion notification back into all TCP stacks, as it was before the BSD stack left it out... Goodbye massive packet loss due to minor congestion. Require all vendors to support jumbo frames... And many more small changes (to the existing internet).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I don't remember who's idea it was, but if we have all future internet devices use encryption (like IPSec and IPv6), then if we have a portion of the ip address be a crypto hash of the devices public key, then it would make spoofing harder. Of course part of the ip address would still have to be reserved for routing purposes for efficiency.
Second, absolutely mandate IPSec. Don't just "mandate" it and then ignore it, as happened with IPv6, but make it a pre-requisite for all users. That gives e-commerce a lot more assurance on secure transactions and authentication, which seems to meet one of their requirements.
Third, mnandate QoS. QoS not only guarantees network quality, which would interest a LOT of corporate users, but also provides a mechanism for increasing profit. Simply offer different levels of guaranteed quality at different prices. This meets another requirement.
Fourth, the biggest new market is in mobile devices and wireless networking. So support them! What is the point of the IETF churning out megabytes of specs on mobile IP and mobile networks, or of software developers supporting all these new protocols, if none of the ISPs or network engineers give a damn? It would also provide an additional service, therefore an additional revenue stream, therefore also meeting the profit requirement.
(Mobile networks are where all the wireless users are going to stay using the same router, but the router itself is moving through the network. If you were to have WAPs on aircraft or trains, where you are static relative to the vehicle, but the vehicle is moving between ground stations, this is probably the way you'd want to implement it.)
Fifth, it is possible to balance anonymity with accountability. Accountability merely requires that machines are who they claim they are and (where user identification is relevent) users are who they claim they are. It does NOT require that anyone actually posesses enough information to actually identify those machines or users, only that when a claim is made, it is verifiable in some way.
We already have Kerberos for authentication, so it would seem a fairly trivial extension to use that as your authentication mechanism. The token does not reveal your identity, but it can be verified with a Kerberos server in the heirarchy used for authentication by that user, to prove that the user did identify themselves correctly.
If that isn't good enough, use X.509 certificates at both host and user levels. Lots more money to be made there. It doesn't kill anonymity, as you can perfectly well have a certificate that doesn't say anything useful or self-incriminating. It would still be useful for accountability, though, as no two entities, no two machines and no two users should have identical certificates. At the very least, the key used to examine the certificate would be different, even if the content itself was identical.
This would be more than good enough to ensure that Joe Bank Manager's personal checking account could not be logged into by Sammy Script-Kiddy - there's your accountability - but would not require people in politically dangerous countries (such as the US) to reveal anything that would compromise their safety, meeting a lot of the anonymity requirement.
As for the "upgrades" cost - that's just because most providers (backbone or ISP) are too cheap to do it right the first time. Optic Fibre has been around a LONG time, and to upgrade an optic link just requires upgrading the transceivers at each end - so long as the fibre is of good enough quality. At present speeds, a single fibre can carry about 4-5 terabits per second, and typical bundles have about 20 or so fibres, giving you 100 terabits per second.
Lets say that, when the US Government was still runnin
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Agreed. NAT isn't a permanent solution. I disagree that sooner is better though. As with anything, the most cost effective transition will begin on its own when the time is right.
I don't know what you mean by buying infrastrcture. We're not losing out on any technology or experience really. If any important services become IPv6 only... well then we'd have a little catch-up--but that is precisely what will deliver the consumer demand.
CISCO is right in their problem prediction but they want to accelerate the timing so as to make money now, not later. Money now == more valuable.
#1 Change: User side one time only credit charges. The only way to do a transaction would be to use an encrypted transaction that would prevent fishing from being any good at all. This would be more of a banking change, and most people would hate it, but the whole CC# and Bank info phishing has to end, the transaction mechanism needs to change.
#2 Change: Add a decorator pattern to ALL explorer windows, making user that every popup has a BRIGHT ORANGE BORDER, turn off the ability to disable the X button. Pretty much make all popups automatically listed as unsecure. Tag all 3 party "unsigned" apps with a Bright RED BORDER, if it isnt trusted you should know, every time you run it.
#3 Change: Add a hardened Email System to the main email. Where hardened email can be flagged as less likely to be spam. The hardened email system would be unprofitable for spammers to use, Proof of work tolkens or a small monitary deposit required for emails that are "in play". This would leave the old email as functional, but would gradually replace it as old email wont be used by real people.
#4 Change: Reduce to number of auto-launched services, anything that it out of the "OS-normal" for launching would be in one big happy spot, where it could be removed. The operating system wouldnt have a "backdoor startup" or a way for the program to re-insrt itself into the system. and the OS would solidly isolate itself from getting nailed by a trojan.. keeping almost everything in a sandbox.
#5 Change: Prevent the system from being able to spy on you. yea, it gets rid of some legitamate monitoring applications, But make it an option in the control panel that is stupid obvious that no-one really wants to turn it on (except corporations that are monitoring their employees).
#6 Change: Have a nice big registry of "BAD Software" If people are online anyway, there should be a way to tag software as JUNK, or SPYWARE, or a dozen other bad bad things.. and when the software is being downloaded, it shoudl be checked against the big database and the user should be VERY appropraitly warned.
Ok that's six off the top of my head.. yea they are mostly focused on microsoft, but thats where most people are hosed anyway. The net isnt bad, but some SIMPLE changes would really make the experience much beter for everyone.
Storm
One of the key points in the article (that has been missed so far) is that the research for this is being done on the National Lambda Rail. One key technology that hasn't been mentioned yet is DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing). This runs 30-40 different wavelengths over a single fiber. Each wavelength (lambda) can currently carry 10 Gb/s of data, 40 Gb/s in some cases, and 100 Gb/s is on its way. That means that a single fiber can carry up to 4 Tb/sec of data in the real near future (right now in some labs). The next important technology is ROADMs (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers). These devices allow individual lambdas to be inserted, extracted, or tapped from a fiber. Next is GMPLS (Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching). This a switching framework that ties together the ROADMs and optical switches to allow a single lambda to be routed through an optical mesh network. Actually it sets up a per use circuit through the mesh for any particular lambda. Also, anything that can be converted to an optical wavelength can be routed over this kind of network, not just ethernet. Fibre Channel, SONET, high defition video and ethernet can all be routed over this kind of network at the same time.
Let me guess, it will contain the data equivalent of a "Broadcast Flag" right? (ie: copyright flag)