Vint Cerf is vice-president and “chief internet evangelist” at Google. If the internet needs proselytisers, Mr Cerf, 64, is more than qualified – he is considered one of the architects of the worldwide web, having developed the protocols that govern it.

At the weekend the American computer scientist gave warning that poor security and poor software design were undermining the reliability of the internet. He said that he was worried about the robustness of computer software and the exposure of the network to hacks that alter the website addressing system.

“The biggest hole we have is with internet browsers, because we have too much access to the functionality of the operating system,” he said, explaining that this made it easy to be infected by viruses and “Trojans”, malicious programs that can be used to take control of a computer.

He was also worried about the security of computer operating systems, but emphasised he was not trying to open up a new front in Google’s increasingly competitive relationship with Microsoft, saying: “I’m not suggesting we point the finger at one company – all operating systems have various weaknesses.”

Mr Cerf – who in 1992 co-founded the Internet Society, which aims both to promote the views of ordinary internet users and to serve as an umbrella body for technical groups developing the internet – expressed confidence that the internet would not eventually collapse because of a lack of capacity in the physical infrastructure. A decade ago, Bob Metcalfe, an engineer, predicted that the internet would suffer a “gigalapse”, but Mr Cerf said he had since recanted. “We haven’t even used up the capacity of a single optical fibre yet,” he said.

However, software bugs – such as the problems that brought the internet phone service Skype to its knees last week – coupled with poor security could cause big problems. Mr Cerf said: “We worry about reliability and resilience at Google, to ensure that the loss of a data centre doesn’t affect everybody.”

Mr Cerf and Bob Kahn are credited with inventing the TCP/IP “handshake” protocol in 1973 and 1974, which helped computers to communicate with each other in a project under the auspices of the US Defence Department. He helped to build Arpanet, the original internet, as part of a project to build a computer network able to survive a nuclear attack.

Mr Cerf, whose first degree was in mathematics from Stanford University and who became a lecturer at his Californian alma mater in the 1970s, is now a consulting engineer, as well as a policy advocate for the search engine giant. He was hired by Google in 2005, after what he has described as “the shortest interview in history” – Mr Cerf e-mailed Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, to ask whether he needed help, and the Google leader simply answered “Yes”. There is a widespread urban myth that the expression “surfing the web” is a corruption of “Cerfing the web ” – not that Mr Cerf, who lives with his family in Virginia, has spread this as gospel in his role as “internet evangelist”.

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