An Interview With Dr. Radia Perlman
An Interview With Dr. Radia Perlman
December 19, 2005: IDM recently caught up with Sun Microsystem’s eminent Dr. Radia Perlman to have a chat about security, arborescent algorithms and the evolution of networking.
How much of your work is necessitated by human failings rather than evil intent when it comes to security? Do you think there are ways that end users can make their lives easier?
We should make the end users life easier. There’s just way to many decisions that we place on the users. We give them all these pop up boxes and then blame them if they answer the questions wrong.
There are various trends that are making things less secure and harder and harder to use. For instance, websites for some reason use all of these fancy features. Some things like cookies can be used in a dangerous way but there’s no way you can turn off these features because the sites that you want to talk to actually use them all.
It would be nice if we could return to a simpler day. I can’t imagine what’s in these new features, that the website can’t adequately represent itself without these things.
Do you think it would be possible to return to simpler times, or are things snowballing into greater complication?
It seems to be snowballing more and more. Everyone wants to add value by making things fancier. And advertising is also driving things with these fancy pop up ads that force you to read them. Sometimes you have to actually answer a question to get rid of them.
It might be that eventually customers complain, or maybe even governments who say we need to make things more secure by saying that we cant keep adding features unless we can make things secure.
What kind of challenges do you face coding in your field, and how have those challenges changed over the years?
Well, it’s astonishing that the stuff we have works as well as it does. Because it was designed back in a time when the world was so different. Bandwidth delay, error rates, even knowledge of networking was different. And certainly there wasn’t the environment of hostility that we have today. Just researchers sharing data, the concept that anyone would purposely try to vandalise things never occurred to anyone. The concept that anyone would purposely try to vandalise things just never occurred to anyone.
So, what we’ve been doing is incremental tweaks to that all along and it’s amazing that it works as well as it does. So sure there is something to be said for “maybe we should re-think everything”.
What obvious things have changed, well, for one there is distributed denial of service. No matter how much bandwidth you have, no matter how much capacity – if someone can break into enough systems and attack you, then they can still cause trouble.
So who would you say is the most influential person in networking these days?
I don’t think there really is any one person.
The most influential force in networking then perhaps?
Well, the politically incorrect answer would be Microsoft because they are powerful enough be able to do their own thing regardless of the standards bodies.
Then there are the standards bodies who are really influential, even though it’s very political and it’s really various companies that have various monopolistic positions that tend to run those. Maybe it’s the spammers and virus writers who are the most influential because they are changing the way we think.
Don’t miss the rest of this interview coming up in January/February issue of IDM magazine!
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