How blockchain will manage networks

Ethernet networking technology is flawed, say some engineers. The problem is it doesn’t have any inherent security built in to it. Ethernet also hard to manage because it’s centralized. It’s out-of-date, and it needs revamping, researchers say.

One attempt to address the issue is the Marconi protocol, which is a strategy to shift network and packet management over to a smart-contract, decentralized chain-based system. Smart contracts are trackable, verifiable transactions. They’re performed through encrypted blockchains and are self-enforcing.

Networking at the data-link level, not just simply the digital traffic and transactions, could be managed by infrastructure-level blockchain, say the folks behind the new protocol. Traffic auditing within network routing could be one of the main uses. Other benefits might be a trickle-down to security in the voids between clouds, addressing the issue of gaps that are common with a disparate cloud mix. If successful, delicately configured security in routers and switches will become redundant.

“Ethernet has no encryption built into its design,” says the Marconi Foundation in its white paper introducing the ideas. “This exposes raw network packets.”

The foundation says this data-link visibility doesn’t make any sense when much of the internet is now all about privacy and transactional security. “Network security protocols operate at several layers higher up the stack, while Ethernet remains insecure,” it says.

Another thing that’s not adding up, the group points out in the paper, is that all blockchain development projects (of which they say there are 1,900 in a $200 billion blockchain ecosystem) are strangely running on insecure Ethernet. The whizz-bang “decentralized future” is actually running on an insecure layer. That’s another reason to update to a smart contract-run network stack. The researchers believe that packet-level encryption would be more secure than existing SSL and TLS.