Indiainitiative.com, the dotcom arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, has prepared a white paper on Internet security and the new protocol being developed worldwide in the wake of the ILOVEYOU virus that wreaked havoc last week, the damage estimates of which have been pegged at $10 billion.
The paper says that scientists worldwide are developing IPv6, the next generation protocol, that promises to take care of two primary concerns plaguing Net users _ security and lack of space; the two areas that have not been taken care of adequately by the current protocol, IPv4.
According to a PwC spokesperson, the need for the new protocol is going to be felt increasingly more in India as hundreds of dotcom sites begin to take off and almost everyone in the Indian corporate sector planning an e-commerce venture.
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According to experts, the new protocol offers security header extensions. This allows a receiver to determine with a high degree of certainty whether or not a packet originated from the host indicated in its source address. This prevents malicious users from configuring an IP host to impersonate another to gain access to secure resources.
Along with the above mentioned safeguard, called packet spoofing, the new protocol would also deal with traffic analysers and network `sniffers', which can surreptitiously eavesdrop on network traffic.
The security factor has been a major stumbling block for the e-commerce industry, and is probably the only reason behind cyber-buying not taking off as expected.
Tackling the problem of space crunch is another area that the new protocol would look into.
The paper says that the current protocol is capable of handling only 4 billion addresses. With the Internet population doubling every eight months, the new protocol would support 2 to the power of 128 addresses.
The new protocol also has the capability of monitoring data traffic from the network and increasing the speed of the network accordingly.