Ken Silva, CTO of Verisign, and His Internet from Scratch Design

Ken Silva, CTO of Verisign, has a different view of how Internet should have been designed. As written: I think I would embed some security into the protocols themselves. Today the network itself provides zero security. There is no security in the network, virtually every packet is passed and pushed. So by embedding some security into the protocols—and some of that was thought of when IP version 6 was developed, but trying to retrofit that on top of the existing infrastructure is going to be a challenge—so I think that many of the protocols themselves would have to have some security embedded in them. And the second thing is that passwords as we know them today would not exist. They’ve actually been obsolete for more than a decade.

If internet was to start with security then it wouldn't have grown as fast as it has. It would be more expensive, more infrastructure to be built and lesser prospects for hackers which mean lesser growth in the Internet security sector. Would Windows Vista have that nagging UAC had the internet been secure right from the get go? Would Firefox surface on a selling point that it was more secure than IE? Would Windows 7 be as interesting had Windows Vista been successful?

Internet would have been a boring place to start with that kind of design.

Source ZDNet.

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