‘We can easily lose the internet in its current state’

Dan Kaminsky, a researcher at security firm White Ops, stated during his keynote address at the Black Hat conference that the Internet in its current state is no guarantee. According to him, it is necessary to designate a central body that ensures stability.

“I want an NIH for cyber,” Kaminsky stated several times during his presentation. By this he means that there is currently no central organization in charge of developing the Internet. He compares it with an organization such as the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, which is charged with researching diseases in America. For Kaminsky, this is an example of a body provided with adequate and stable funding. Without it, he sees the internet going in the wrong direction with ever-increasing security vulnerabilities.

“I want a hundred geeks to be able to work on a project for ten years without being disturbed,” he explained. “At the moment, however, everything is all about speed.” He sees this mainly happening in the field of security. However, that would leave out the important things. For example, Kaminsky sees the need to share information about security and not to keep it secret: “Don’t try to compete on security,” is his appeal.

However, he does not like the fact that Icann plays a central role on the internet: “That organization only exists to say no and to stop bad ideas”, he believes. He adds that the Internet as it exists today also evolved from a different version: “In the 1990s, big companies like AOL and AT&T tried to bend the Internet to their will and make billions from it, but there the internet is not made for it.” According to Kaminsky, right now we could just replace things that don’t work and use encryption whenever we want. But this too would come under pressure.

During his presentation, Kaminsky also pays attention to his own project called ‘Autoclave’. This is a browser that runs within a container on a virtual machine. This allows a user to use the internet with much less risk, because it is not their own computer that is exposed to malicious software. This project is one of his efforts to address current security issues. Kaminsky is best known for his role in the discovery of a vulnerability in the DNS system in 2008.