Digital signatures and strong key management are needed to prevent this glaring problem. If we rely upon hierarchical caches to improve the speed of the 'Net, the cache servers become single points of failure. This is an architectural step backwards to centralized management. Strong security controls are needed to protect the central databases. Advertising-based Web sites must be concerned about whether their hit counters measure visits to the clones as well as to the original server.
Many Web pages are dynamic, and the content is refreshed often.
Surfers want the latest and greatest information, not last month's news. Care must be taken to synchronize the HTML, HTTP server and cached clones so traffic is routed to the proper server. If the cloned sites at the caches are indexed by search spiders, subsequent searches can find multiple copies of the same pages. Surfers can't tell the original from the clone and can't locate erroneous or old information. Content producers are concerned that illicit copies of their material constitute a breach of their intellectual property rights and may dilute the material's value.