The future will be easy to use

[Perry E. Metzger]

attila writes:
>     figures. I'll give ipsec and ipsec-dev a look.  However, SUN does have
> the power to make something happen on the high-power workstations, and the
> fact they are making a portable package available in source code is
> farther than anyone else has gone. 

Unfortunately, an internetworking protocol used by only one vendor
gets nowhere.

>     my experience over the last 15 years with Sun is that they do listen 
> to outside "noise" and will move forward.

I doubt it. Ashar Aziz and company at Sun are pretty much
ego-committed to SKIP. Their group might not have nearly as much
justification for its existance without it. That probably makes them
reluctant to go in the right direction.

>    other than the inferior method v. DH, is there anything else missing; 
> I will probably pull the code package of the developers' access machine 
> before the week is out just to take a look.

SKIP is really very alien from the direction most of IPSEC is
taking. It sacrifices a lot of functionality for the perceived benefit
of being able to send an encrypted packet to a host "without prior
negotiation". Unfortunately, that benefit turns out to be a mirage
because in any real network you would need to do a certificate lookup
in order to actually decrypt the packet, at which point you've lost
any advantage. SKIP requires all sorts of hooks into the ESP/AH packet
formats which makes it essentially incompatbile with ESP/AH
implementations. SKIP uses long term keys which could really hurt if
they were compromised. SKIP doesn't do perfect forward secrecy. I
could go on and on.

Ashar keeps answering every criticism with "well, you COULD do X in
SKIP if you just hung this kludge onto it, but of course we hope most
people would never do that".

I started with a lot for respect for the guys and lost most of it
through time. Ah, well.

Perry