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Re: draft-ietf-ipsec-esp-des-md5-01.txt



> quoting from the draft:
> 
>       This draft describes a combination of privacy and optionally,
>       authentication, integrity and replay prevention into a single packet
>       format.
> 
> and later:
> 
>       The combinations of transformations are negotiated at key
>       establishment time such as described in ISA/KMP [Maughan96] and
>       Oakley [Orman96]. To conform with this RFC, of the 3 transforms
>       documented in this RFC, only esp-DES-HMAC-RP shall be
>       implemented.
> 
> Ok, is integrity protection mandatory or not?

The text here seems to be clumbsy.

> My impression (and please correct me if I'm wrong) was that the
> consensus of the WG at the LA IETF was that privacy without integrity
> was too dangerous to implement; however, this draft is internally
> inconsistant about whether integrity is mandatory, and specifies
> transforms which it says should not be implemented.
> 
> What's changed?

Nothing has "changed". If anything my text is less than clear.

The mandetory transform is des-hmac. It is optional to not have the integrity 
and not to have replay. 

As Bellovan has stated, DES-CBC without integrity has several vulnerabilties, 
but that does not eliminate the viabilitiy of a des-only transform for 
performance sensitive solutions that understand these vulnerabilities and 
make an informed decision that the elimination of the hmac is not a problem. 

Suggested text for the above 2 paragraphs will be welcome.

Is Ran's text replacent better?

jim