[16145] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: potential new IETF WG on anonymous IPSec
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Zooko O'Whielacronx)
Mon Sep 13 13:31:21 2004
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: 12 Sep 2004 06:18:25 -0300
From: "Zooko O'Whielacronx" <zooko@zooko.com>
To: "Sandy Harris" <sandy@storm.ca>
Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: <41435E0D.2070204@storm.ca>
On 2004, Sep 11, , at 17:20, Sandy Harris wrote:
> Zooko O'Whielcronx wrote:
>
>> I believe that in the context of e-mail [1, 2, 3, 4] and FreeSWAN
>> this is called "opportunistic encryption".
>
> That is certainly not what FreeS/WAN meant by "opportunistic
> encryption".
> http://www.freeswan.org/freeswan_trees/freeswan-1.99/doc/
> glossary.html#carpediem
That link leads to the following definition: "A situation in which any
two IPsec-aware machines can secure their communications, without a
pre-shared secret and without a common PKI or previous exchange of
public keys. This is one of the goals of the Linux FreeS/WAN project,
discussed in our introduction section. Setting up for opportunistic
encryption is described in our configuration document."
This definition is indeed consistent with the concept that we are
discussing.
If FreeS/WAN's implementation boils down to using DNS as a common PKI
that is too bad, but their definition (which explicitly excludes a
common PKI) seems to be the same as mine.
This concept is too important to go without a name. Currently the best
way to tell your interlocutor what concept you are talking about seems
to be "you know, the way SSH does it, with the
first-time-unauthenticated public key exchange....". I heartily
approve of Peter Gutmann's suggestion to write an RFC for it.
Regards,
Zooko
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