ITinfo: National Science Foundation Commissions Secure Internet Infrastructure

Toward a Secure Internet

Universities enlisted to create data security

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National Science Foundation Commissions Secure Internet Infrastructure

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is expected to announce later today that it has selected five universities to develop a secure, decentralized infrastructure for the Internet. The Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems (IRIS) project will create a distributed hash table (DHT) that facilitates distributed data systems.

DHT technology creates multiple pointers to data, concurrently storing data files on several servers. If one server is inaccessible, not all of the data is lost. Similar to peer-to-peer networks in which there is no central server, a DHT system does not have a central control point for all data.

The IRIS project will develop a lookup algorithm that enables dislocated data to be quickly acquired and assembled. The project, once implemented, will afford greater security of online data in the event of a targeted or general outage due to viruses, worms or cyberattack.

The NSF has initially awarded $12 million over five years to the following computer science departments: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, the International Computer Science Institute, New York University, and Rice University.

Dave's Opinion

Last evening, during an e-business graduate seminar at the University of Phoenix, I posed two questions to the students that generated a significant discussion: 1) what technologies do they not use and 2) what must change before e-commerce becomes the norm, rather than onground commerce. One of the primary technologies that they agreed must develop further before they judged e-commerce would become the preferred medium was security, especially the protection of private, individual information and commercial transaction data. I think is coincidental that today the National Science Foundation will announce a project to develop a secure storage medium for Internet-based data.

I left the seminar's students with a final question to consider until the next class meeting: what must change such that you could create a totally e-business for your organization. In effect, what must occur before you could be totally paperless, geographically independent, and asynchronous in all of your operations and services? How about it? What changes must be implemented for your organization to be totally e?

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References

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updated September 25, 2002
http://dgl.com/itinfo/2002/it020925.html