Responding to a New York Times article on a Stanford research project that proposes a new Internet with no anonymity and limits on which software you can run (a "safer" Internet), Princeton's Ed Felten explains two gross misconceptions in the piece:
First is the notion that today's security problems are caused by weaknesses in the network itself. In fact, the vast majority of our problems occur on, and are caused by weaknesses in, the endpoint devices: computers, mobile phones, and other widgets that connect to the Net. The problem is not that the Net is broken or malfunctioning, it's that the endpoint devices are misbehaving — so the best solution is to secure the endpoint devices. To borrow an analogy from Gene Spafford, if people are getting mugged at bus stops, the solution is not to buy armored buses.
(Of course, there are some security issues with the network itself, such as vulnerability of routing protocols and DNS. We should work on fixing those. But they aren't the problems people normally complain about — and they aren't the ones mentioned in the Times piece.)
The second misconception is that the founders of the Internet had no plan for protecting against the security attacks we see today. Actually they did have a plan which was simple and, if executed flawlessly, would have been effective. The plan was that endpoint devices would not have remotely exploitable bugs.
(via Hack the Planet)
