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Re: Comments on latest IPSP drafts
Donald Eastlake said:
General compression of packets is increasingly being handled by the link
hardware.
Link-layer compression is useless when encryption is done at the network
layer. The motivation for considering network-layer compression is to do the
compression before the encryption. Otherwise, the compression function gets
uncompressable input.
I consider that you do not share this vision but consider the job of
the IETF to be to limit the Global Internet to whatever the US
Government happens to want to let through its border filters acording to
today's whim to be your loss.
This is not a fair representation of what I have been saying. I am not arguing
that we should "... limit the Global Internet ..." and I am happy to see DES or
other strong encryption as an optional part of the standard. I simply that
making it a **required** part of the standard is ignoring a fact of the world
that is real, whether we like it or not. I would prefer to standardize on two
encryption transforms: one (relatively) weak and one strong. We should make
the comparative strengths of these transforms clear in the standards, so that
potential users can assess for themselves the tradeoffs among security,
technology, and governmental constraints.
Perhaps changing the IETF from an engineering to a political body is an
effective way to proceed. I disagree.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark H. Linehan
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, New York
linehan@watson.ibm.com; LINEHAN at WATSON
http://w3.watson.ibm.com/~linehan/home.html (inside IBM only)
(914) 784-7860; 8-863-7860; fax (914) 784-7484
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