Securing and Improving the Internet Architecture

The information transfer protocol that supports the modern Internet with its hundreds of thousands of petabytes per month to billions of Internet users across the world was designed in 1981, and it lacks the capacity to properly ensure the security and stability of the Internet today. Features such as the prevention of network attacks, a large address space for the increasing number of devices, verification of the source of an Internet request, and so on are all absent from the current architecture. This paper seeks to review, summarize, and compare six proposals submitted to address the issues IP faces- the Accountable Internet Protocol, the Expressive Internet Architecture, MobilityFirst, Passport, StopIt, and the Traffic Validation Architecture. Finally, the paper details a protocol design that not only is feasible to adopt with the present infrastructure/computing power but also addresses some of the pressing issues of IP, with particular focus on the address space, mitigation of network attacks, and source verification.