The Internet Must Die

The Internet Must Die.  It must cease to be what it is and be reborn. 

A few months ago I had a conversation with a man who had left an IT career to enter religious life.  At one point in the conversation he asked me about the state of security in the industry.

"Absolutely horrible," I told him.  "We are living in the equivalent of the wild west." 

After hearing some details he was astonished.  "How did it get this way?" he asked.

How it got this way is simple.  Getting into trouble is always a very easy thing to do.  Getting out of it is the hard part. 

There are two primary reasons that our systems are so insecure.

First, nearly everything is on the net (even things that don't need to be), and nearly every protocol on which the net operates is intrinsically insecure.

ARP, BGP, DNS, DHCP, TCP, IP...  The list goes on.  These are insecure protocols, designed for a pollyannaish garden of Eden, where even the snake is uneager to exploit vulnerabilities.

A foundation so weak cannot support a robust, secure network.  But it is precisely this foundation, this set of protocols, that makes the internet what it is.

It therefore must cease to be what it is.  It must be replaced by, or morphed into, a network built on a new set of secure protocols. It must die and be reborn.  Hence the title of this post.

But I said there are two primary reasons why things are so bad, and the second one is actually a bigger problem.  Most of software that is running on the net (web apps, or other apps running on devices that are online), were also developed -- and continue to be developed -- with the same naive outlook as that of the protocol designers.  The same pollyannaish Eden.

Every developer I know (myself included) has been guilty of neglecting to harden our apps, if not routinely, then more than once.  And even to the extent that sometimes we developers actually pay attention to security, the average developer, in my experience, does not have adequate knowlege and skill to avoid, detect and prevent vulnerabilities anyway.

Yeah, yeah, I know, most of us don't want to have to spend time thinking about security.  We just want to get the app working. But we can't afford to take that attitude anymore.  [In my next post, I'll take a look at one fallacy that is partly to blame for our lax disposition toward security.]

But if we continue to be lax, if we refuse to start thinking about how we secure our apps and actually do so for every app we build, it will not be long before software developers will need malpractice insurance, because we're going to start getting sued.

It will not be long before companies are going to start being held liable for their apps that get hacked and start spreading trojans and botnets.  I'm only surprised it hasn't happened already.