Vint Cerf on cyber security

Vint Cerf, known as the “father of the Internet” and MCI’s senior vice president of technology strategy, spoke with IDG News Service Correspondent John Blau about the current state of cyber threats, IPv6 developments, and why he thinks the Internet is better today than it was during the dot-com boom.

IW: If you look at cyber attacks, what scares you the most?

VC: The harder attacks are the DDoS attacks where somebody has already broken into 100,000 PCs sitting on totally unprotected DSL and cable modems and has all of them launch back at the target. This is really hard to defend against. Because when these DDoS attacks swamp access lines, then filtering at the other end doesn’t help.

IW: How is work progressing on the next-generation IPv6?

VC: After having sat in a standardized state for 10 years, I now see some significant momentum. At MCI, we have made a commitment to implement and deploy IPv6 during 2005. We have been using it for a long time in the private academic vBNS (very high performance Backbone Network Service) system.

IW: Who else is pushing for IPv6?

VC: Japan and, increasingly, China. You can understand why the Chinese are pushing IPv6. Their Internet usage is growing very rapidly, and they can do the math: If everyone in China needed an IPv4 address, the country would use one third of the public IP address space. If we ran out of IPv4 address space, it would be like running out of oil.

IW: Is the Internet any better today than during the Net bubble?

VC: Yes, and for two reasons. First, venture capitalists are now investing in areas that actually make business sense. This means that more care is taken with regard to how money is invested and which startups get the attention. Second, despite the dot-boom and dot-bust, network capacity and connectivity continue to grow. There is an underlying, fundamental reliance on the Internet, which continues to grow in the number of users, country penetration, and both fixed and wireless broadband access.