Why Vint Cerf Thinks Net Security Should Go Back to the Future
Not too many people would know or remember this, but Vint Cerf is one who does: May 2014 marks the 40th anniversary of the first publication of the description of what we know today as the Internet.
In September 1973, Cerf and a colleague, Robert Kahn, wrote a paper, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication," for the May 1974 edition of IEEE Transactions on Communications. The dissertation described how packets of digital data would be able to move from one computer node to another, then to another, then to many others, using new protocols and standard phone networks.
One of those protocols, designed and written that same year, was TCP/IP, short for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. It remains the key data movement protocol of the Internet; in 1983, it became a standard. Another of those protocols, FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, enables users to log on to a remote computer, list the files on that computer and download files from that computer.
