[At-Large] ICANN Blog : Relying on ICANN Community-Developed Processes for a Safe, Secure Interne

[Karl Auerbach]

On 1/6/22 5:05 PM, bzs at theworld.com wrote:
> We never designed it to do things which require so much security.
> ...
>
> The net was designed to share pictures of cats...

Our mileage is varying.  There are diverse histories of the net - the 
history of the net does kinda resemble that fabled elephant and the 
blind men.

I worked for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff back in the early 1970's and 
then for various three-letter US agencies in Maryland for much of the 
rest of that decade.  We started with ARPAnet technology and moved 
forward.  Our focus was operating system and network security (for which 
I designed and built the first verified B-level secure operating system.)

Anyway... it was always our goal back then to bake security deeply into 
the net.  And by the latter part of the 1970's we had invented a lot of 
stuff that had to be re-invented later, such as IPsec, key management, 
virtual networks, and lots and lots of software/hardware that used 
security tagging and capabilities.  We actually implemented most of 
these things and got them working in production environments.

(Why re-invented?  Because we were doing stuff for agencies that were 
extremely paranoid about national security implications - remember 
during the 1970's the cold war was running very hot.  So we could not 
publish anything about what we worked on.)

         --karl--