Is the Internet firewall headed for extinction? That was the intriguing subtext to a talk today by William Cheswick, a firewall pioneer. As a researcher at Bell Labs, he wrote an early technical paper on firewalls in 1990, “The Design of a Secure Internet Gateway,” and 1994 (with a second edition in 2003), he cowrote a classic text on the subject, “Firewalls and Internet Security.”

For the last couple of years, though, Mr. Cheswick said he has been experimenting with “Internet skinny-dipping,” which is his colorful phrase for Internet computing without firewalls.

At The New York Times.

[ Read more ]