Bye, bye internet?

2007-04-20 15:19

New York - Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on September 2, 1969.

The internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."

No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.

Even Vinton Cerf, one of the internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was "generally healthy" because the current technology "does not satisfy all needs".

The National Science Foundation wants to build an experimental research network known as the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, and is funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design, or FIND.

Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the universities pursuing individual projects.

A new network could run parallel with the current internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture.

'A risky business'

Professor Basie von Solms, a senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg has told Beeld it wouldn't be practical to start from scratch with the internet.

But he said a "clean slate" project could be of value in thinking anew about the internet's inherent shortcomings.

According to Von Solms inadequate security (against hacking and fraud) was one of the most important considerations.

"The internet is an unsafe environment. It was originally intended for universities to be able to exchange information.

"Nobody was bothered at that time about security issues."

With increasing commercial use of the internet this shortcoming became apparent.

He said despite measures to address the internet's shortcomings and the factors that make it possible to exploit them, using the internet "remains a risky business, especially for those who aren't aware of the risks".

Von Solms said it was a fact that the internet had more positives than negatives, and that it had "changed the world forever".

"All users should however be aware of the risks and be able to implement basic safety measures," he said.

The clean-slate efforts are still in their early stages, though, and aren't expected to bear fruit for another 10 or 15 years - assuming the US Congress comes through with funding.

- AP