We could, today, make the internet a much safer place to compute. All the open-standard protocols required to significantly decrease malicious attackers and malware already exist. What is missing is the leadership and involvement from the politicians, organisations, and tech experts necessary to turn the vision into a reality. Several protocols already in existence could serve as a foundation for a more secure internet... They include:

• Trusted Platform Module (TPM)
• IP version 6 (IPv6)
• Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC)
• Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)
• OpenID
• Open Authorisation (oAuth)
• Multifactor authentication
• WS-Security protocols
• Interface for Metadata Access Points (IF-MAP)
• Application-level security

...SAML is an XML-based protocol used to exchange security information between security domains. It is used by most of the protocols I cover below, including OpenID and oAuth, as well as multifactor authentication, all of which are becoming more common on the internet...

Read the complete article in Computerworld New Zealand.