Don't secure the internet, it needs crime: Whitfield Diffie

While many people see securing the internet as a means to stopping cybercrime, former vice president for information security and cryptography at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Whitfield Diffie thinks that internet crime may be necessary.

Diffie, who spoke at the Australian Information Security Association's National Conference 2012 in Sydney this week, is better known for his contribution to the cryptography community by devising with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle the Diffie-Hellman public key exchange method.

He said that the security problems we face today aren't necessarily due to the unsecure nature of the internet, drawing a parallel to its reliability. He pointed out that reliability on the internet wasn't created by designing it into its bottom layer, stating that if it were, the cost to implement such a network would be substantial. Instead, he said that today's Internet Protocol is a cheap, unreliable way of communicating, and that when reliability is required, other protocols are introduced as needed.