Making The Internet Secure By Default

Pervasive monitoring on the Internet is enabled by the lack of general, fundamental security. In his presentation at the 88th IETF Bruce Schneier called for ubiquitous use of security technologies to make pervasive monitoring too expensive and thus impractical. However, today security is too operationally expensive, and thus only used where strictly required. In this position paper we argue that all network transactions can be secure by default, with minimal or no operator involvement. This requires an autonomic approach where all devices in a domain enrol automatically in a trust domain. Once they share a common trust anchor they can secure communications between themselves, following a domain policy which is by default secure. The focus of this proposal is the network itself, with all protocols between network elements, including control plane protocols (e.g., routing protocols) and management plane protocols (e.g., SSH, netconf, etc). The proposal is evolutionary and allows a smooth migration from today's Internet technology, device by device.