[80875] in Cypherpunks
Re: Crypto Disputes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Wagner)
Fri May 30 18:02:58 1997
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: daw@cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner)
Date: 30 May 1997 14:21:25 -0700
Reply-To: daw@cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner)
In article <1.5.4.32.19970529230949.00937498@pop.pipeline.com>,
John Young <jya@pipeline.com> wrote:
> For two years, the IETF Security Group has labored to
> hammer out the IP Security (IPSec) protocol, a standard way
> that businesses can open up an encrypted link to a trading
> partner's network. [...]
>
> But an unresolved, bitter dispute over the technique for
> automatically swapping keys over the 'Net - referred to as
> key management - has resulted in two incompatible schemes
> in the IPSec specification.
>
> In this battle of the acronyms, the debate centers on the
> Simple Key Management for IP (SKIP), developed by Sun
> Microsystems, Inc., and the Internet Secure Association Key
> Management Protocol (ISAKMP), developed by the National
> Security Agency.
Heh. This article is way behind the times. (Either that, or the reporter
has been listening too closely to Sun marketing hype.)
ISAKMP/Oakley has been endorsed as the mandatory-to-support key management
standard for ipsec. Proposals to make SKIP mandatory were explicitly rejected.
The bitter debate is over, and ISAKMP/Oakley won.
> The link is encrypted after authentication
> by means of an X.509 digital certificate at an IPSec-based
> firewall or gateway.
Hoo boy is this reporter clueless! Don't you believe it for even an instant.
