Future Trends in Internet Security

The Internet is, by far, one of the most significant achievement in recent history. When it was designed and started as Arpanet in 1970s, the Internet was never intended to be secure or open for commercial use. In the 1980s, the Internet was structured to accommodate 4.3 billion potential network addresses. It afforded roughly one address for every person on earth. Yet today, with more than 50 million users on-line, the address space is getting short. The solution, yet to be implemented and deployed, is the Internet Protocol v6 (IPv6), or IP next generation IPng. IPv6 will offer better security and performance and will allow a wide range (up to 3 X 1038) of nodes. Nodes will include almost any device anyone can imagine; even sensors, doors, and cars will have IP addresses so they can be controlled from afar. The Internet, as I hope, seems to be the infrastructure for the global village but without security, not only ecommerce is in danger, but also human lives could be at stake.