CERF: Classified NSA Work Mucked Up Security For Early TCP/IP by Paul Roberts.
From the post:
Did the National Security Agency, way back in the 1970s, allow its own priorities to stand in the way of technology that might have given rise to a more secure Internet? You wouldn’t be crazy to reach that conclusion after hearing an interview with Google Vice President and Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf on Wednesday.
As a graduate student in Stanford in the 1970s, Cerf had a hand in the creation of ARPANet, the world’s first packet-switched network. He later went on to work as a program manager at DARPA, where he funded research into packet network interconnection protocols that led to the creation of the TCP/IP protocol that is the foundation of the modern Internet.
Cerf is a living legend who has received just about every honor a technologist can: including the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But he made clear in the Google Hangout with host Leo Laporte that the work he has been decorated for – TCP/IP, the Internet’s lingua franca – was at best intended as a proof of concept, and that only now – with the adoption of IPv6 – is it mature (and secure) enough for what Cerf called “production use.”
Specifically, Cerf said that given the chance to do it over again he would have designed earlier versions of TCP/IP to look and work like IPV6, the latest version of the IP protocol with its integrated network-layer security and massive 128 bit address space. IPv6 is only now beginning to replace the exhausted IPV4 protocol globally.
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Paul later points out that we can’t know the impact of then available security would have had on the creation and adoption of the Internet.
Fair point.
And there isn’t any use in crying over spilled milk.
However, after decades of lying, law breaking and trying to disadvantage the population it is alleged to serve, why isn’t Congress defunding the NSA now?
If an agency has a proven track record of law-breaking and lying to Congress, what reason is there to credit any report, any statement or any information the NSA claims to have gathered?
You know the saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me?
The entire interview:
If you aren’t worried about privacy, human rights, etc., let’s make it a matter of dollars and cents.
Think about the economic losses and expenses of your enterprise from an insecure Internet or the profits you could be making with a secure Internet.
The NSA has been at war against your commercial interests for as long as the Internet has existed. If you are serious about the Internet and information, then it is time to rid everyone of the #1 drag on ecommerce, the NSA.
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