A new version of the internet may solve the ongoing problem of security and online attacks

A brand new internet may be the solution to the escalating problem of online security, according to some experts.

According to the New York Times senior writer John Markoff, there is a ‘growing belief among engineers and security experts that internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over'.

He claimed that the original designers of the internet did not foresee the potential it now has of carrying all of the world's communications and commerce and little attention was given to security.

Eugene Spafford, executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University, said: “In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago, because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.”

Named ‘The Stanford Clean Slate project', Markoff claimed that it ‘won't by itself solve all the main security issues of the internet, but it will equip software and hardware designers with a toolkit to make security features a more integral part of the network and ultimately give law enforcement officials more effective ways of tracking criminals through cyberspace'.

He said that the Stanford engineers feel that they are on a mission to reinvent the internet, and argues that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world.

Markoff said: “Like the existing internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organisation will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today's network and are adopted as internet standards.

“A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great trade-off for the designers of the next internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers' licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the internet.”