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Vint Cerf Wants Help Figuring Out the Future of the Internet and Communications
dkatana writes: Vint Cerf, one of the original creators of today's internet, wrote a letter asking everyone to participate to create the foundation of the next internet. He said, "As communication forms evolve, it will be important to preserve one of the oldest: the letter, which has been critical in building relationships, conducting business and governmental affairs, and preserving history. Rather than sounding the death knell for meaningful, written correspondence, Internet technology has the power to enhance it." Cerf cites Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln as a perfect example of what might not be possible for historians of the next generation. Goodwin pieced together letters written by President Lincoln and his cabinet to write a book about how they interacted. "In the case of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the letters were 140 years old, and I would guess that digital content that was created 10 years ago won't be accessible 10 years from now," said Cerf. "We have the media around, but you may not be able to read it."
It isn't just about the technical problem of how to preserve/read digital information.
Back in the day (get off my lawn!) it took a lot more thought and planning to create a document, without instant digital editing etc. Those old letters, books, et. al., took a lot more time and effort to create, and were considerably more difficult to edit and modify, and as a result, tended to have more forethought and planning before putting words down.
As a result, penning a few paragraphs or an essay or two wasn't such a casual endeavor as it is today.
Now that any monkey with a keyboard (and a little cut-and-paste ability) can create volumes of prose, the signal to noise ratio is a lot lower. IMHO, we don't want or need to preserve every piece of text (or image) ever created. The problem is, how do we tell the signal from the noise?
Even if we were able to preserve all digital information across time, nimbly leaping from one format or platform to another, would we want to? And if we did, what a vast amount of garbage! Might as well preserve all our landfills, in case future historians have a desperate need to pick thru them...
Of course, the NSA is probably already doing this, and has just the search algorithm to target YOU, citizen!
Start by replacing the broken CA model and push much harder for alternatives like DANE and the EFF Sovereign Keys proposal.
Stop the NSA or the Chinese Government (or hackers who steal the master keys for a CA ala DigiNotar) from being able to generate a certificate for a domain and perform MITM attacks with it.
Replace TLS with something designed from the ground up to be as simple as possible. Any "optional" features in the protocol that could be turned on by the server or client are extra vectors for attack.
Mandate forward-secrecy (via Ephemeral Diffie-Helman or similar) to prevent bad guys who later obtain private keys from decrypting previous traffic. Support only the strongest algorithms (RSA with at least 2048 bits, AES, SHA2/SHA3) and dont support obsolete algorithms like RC4, SHA1, MD5, DES or 3DES.
Make email encryption so easy anyone can do it. And build it into all the popular email clients (with encryption turned on by default) so that encrypted email becomes the rule rather than the exception.
Invent open-standard open-protocol chat programs (for voice, video, text and file transfer) with end-to-end encryption (including some sort of forward secrecy so that once the session is over, it becomes impossible for anyone to decrypt the conversations and get the data back)