In 2003 Martìn Casado found himself with no small challenge on his hands: he needed to reinvent the technology that underpins the Internet. It had been developed decades earlier and was proving unsuited to an era of cyberwarfare.Casado, then a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had been approached by a U.S. intelligence agency with a thorny problem. Computer networking technology allowed intelligence agents and other government workers worldwide to stay connected to one another at all times. Field agents could instantly share data seized in a raid with experts anywhere in the world. But the fact that so many computer networks were enmeshed also aided enemy hackers. Once they gained entry to one system, they could hop across networks to search for other treasures. The agency (Casado won’t say which one) told him it wanted to keep its large network but reserve the ability to temporarily close off parts of it for crucial transmissions, creating a data equivalent of the dedicated telephone hotline that used to link the White House and the Kremlin.To read this MIT Technology Review report in full, see:
www.technologyreview.com/computing/39631/