In defense of NASA: was Re: Wirin' up blinkenlights

On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, Douglas Quebbeman wrote: > > > Is > > > the lack of security on the Internet possibly a well designed

Yes, the ARPAnet (funded by DARPA - DEFENSE Advanced Research blah blah) was the prototype for a distributed communications system built to survive a nuclear attack. MILnet was built based on this prototype, and is in use today. It is mostly secure because there are only a few, tightly controlled, gateways to the Internet. NSFnet was the publically funded arm developed to facilitate communication between universities and a few corporations. For the most part individuals that had access to the Internet were college upperclassmen, who had a real reason to have access. My first experience was in the mid-80's, when more lowerclassmen were being granted access. This brought about the proliferation of ftp sites with pictures of nekked women, and the threat from NSF to disconnect any site (they could do that, and make it stick) engaged in such a frivolous waste of bandwidth. There still wasn't a great need for security because the only people having access were college educated individuals without a great design to destroy. Hacking into remote computers was done for the challenge and to discover new stuff. Then AOL came along :) With the selling of backbone connections by AT&T and others, and the proliferation of internet connections that NSF didn't control, NSFnet was soon overwhelmed and absorbed by the Internet. We now have an anarchy of competing ISPs tied into the Internet, and low cost access available to any monkey with a keyboard. There is now a real need to protect the backbone against malicious hackers, but no real way to do it.