The Internet is a global computer network that covers the entire world. Today, the Internet has about 15 million subscribers in more than 150 countries. Every month the size of the network increases by 7-10%. The Internet forms a kind of nucleus, linking various information networks belonging to different institutions all over the world, one to the other.
Whereas previously the network was used exclusively as a medium for the transmission of files and e-mail messages, today more complex problems of distributed access to resources are being solved. About two years ago, shells supporting network search and access to distributed information resources and electronic archives were created. The Internet, which once served exclusively research and educational groups whose interests extended all the way to accessing supercomputers, is becoming increasingly popular in the business world.
Data security is a major concern on the Internet. There are more and more horror stories about how computer hackers, using increasingly sophisticated techniques, break into other people’s databases. Of course, all this does not help the popularity of the Internet in business circles. The mere thought that some hooligans, or even worse, competitors, could gain access to archives of commercial data makes the heads of corporations refuse to use open information systems. Experts argue that such fears are unfounded, as companies with access to both open and private networks have almost equal chances to become victims of computer terror.
Every organization dealing with any kind of value sooner or later faces an attack on it. The prudent ones begin to plan their defense in advance, the inconsiderate ones after the first major “breach”. One way or another, there is the question of what, how, and from whom to protect.
Firstly, to eliminate the physical link between the future Internet (which will become the World Wide Web) and corporate and institutional networks, keeping between them only information communication through the WWW.
Secondly, to replace routers with switches, eliminating the processing of IP-protocol in the nodes and replace it with Ethernet frame translation mode, in which the process of switching is reduced to a simple operation of comparing MAC-addresses.
Thirdly, move to a new unified address space based on physical addresses of access to the transmission medium (MAC-layer), tied to the geographical location of the network, and allowing within 48-bit to create addresses for more than 64 trillion independent nodes.