Matt Blaze says:

Well, if by swIPe you mean the standards-track IP security protocol, quite a bit. I'm not going to the next IETF meeting (perry?, phil?) but I understand that swIPe and friends have mutated into something that is very close to becoming an RFC.

True.

Key management is another story, with no general agreement as to what the requirements even are.

Less true; there are multiple proposals, but none of them meet my internal standards on what is needed :-)

My own feeling is that more experience is needed with network-layer security in general before the problems and tradeoffs of key managment in heterogeneous networks will emerge with any clarity.

I would partially agree. We do have some actual real world experience with one key management and authentication system -- Kerberos. Its not sufficient, but it does provide a lot of interesting lessons. In particular, it has a distinct advantage over most the the currently proposed key management systems in the IETF: it is actually possible to write secure applications with Kerberos. (This is not as bad as it sounds; there are still ways to use the proposed key management systems (for setting up encrypted tunnels as an example) but these uses are more limited.)

If you mean swIPe, the protocol described in Ioannidis and Blaze's draft RFC of last December, not much. There's an implementation floating around (I think on the ucb ftp server), but I don't know of anyone who's actively deploying it outside of closed systems.

Actually, swIPe the implementation has been ported to three systems (largely berkeley clones) and is being actively sold as part of the TIS firewall product. However, its future with its current packet format is obviously limited. swIPe the packet format is quite dead, but swIPe the implementation will probably be hacked to support the IPSP protocol, whatever it ends up being in the end.

Now would is a very good time to play with this stuff, particularly with an eye toward understanding what the key management requirements are. Right now the future internet cryptographic security architecture is wide open, but that window is starting to close.

Quite true. Perry