Internet

Tags

networking

Millions of computing devices each connected to each other through communication links (fiber, copper, radio, satellite).

The internet is [see page 8, subdivided] into several groupings ranging from a global ISP, regional ISP, home network etc.

Shortcomings of the internet?

The internet itself has various [see page 20, shortcomings]:

• No confidentiality, every intermediate party in a request transfer can observe the contents of what we transmit.
• No integrity, there's nothing in the protocol itself stopping intermediate points from manipulating the packets in transit.
• No authentication, browser/server don't really know who they are talking to apart from the IP address.

Each of these issues need to be worked around at the application-layer, due to lacking such features at the transfer layer.