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Re: IPSEC WG chairs unresponsive, disruptive, and biased

> Ashar had attempted to remove my co-chair (Ran) for bias through
> complaints to the IAB.  The accusation stated that there must be an unfair
> bias since his employer had announced a implementation that was not based
> on SKIP (please excuse my terse summary).

Paul,

I am disappointed that you have chosen to bring this issue on
to the list. However, now that you have done so, I feel it
is only appropriate to set the record straight.

After Cisco became the corporate sponsor of ISAKMP/Oakley in March,
I sent mail to Ran personally, asking him to resign because of the
potential conflict-of-interest.  I asked that someone who had no
interest in either protocol replace Ran as co-chair.  I Cc'd you
and Jeff Schiller on this request.  Ran never responded. Jeff 
Schiller said that he did not believe that a conflict of
interest existed.

Several months went by, and the situation did not improve. It
only got worse, as evidenced by the included (public) posting
by Ran below. Since my appeals to the Area Director failed,
and the sort of behaviour documented below continued, I then sent
a detailed history of my participation in this process, and
its lack of openness and fairness (from my perspective) to
another IESG member. 

Your terse summary does injustice to this sequence of events.

> I have also seen no specific bias by my co-chair against the SKIP 
> technology.

We posted an announcement of our SKIP Developer's Workshop to
comp.security.misc.  This is a response which Ran posted:

| From: rja@cisco.com (Ran Atkinson)
| Newsgroups: comp.security.misc
| Subject: Re: SKIP Developers Workshop
| Date: 18 May 1996 20:00:24 GMT
| Organization: cisco Systems, Incorporated
| Lines: 19
| Distribution: world
| Message-ID: <4nla8o$j6t@cronkite.cisco.com>
| References: <4ng44c$9sv@news.incog.com>
| NNTP-Posting-Host: puli.cisco.com
|  
| Note that no _current_ implementation of SKIP _fully_ conforms with the IETF
| specifications of IP Security.  It would be nice if they did, but they don't
| (e.g. they only support SPI==1 which is contrary to the requirements in
| RFC-1825).
|  
| Folks who are interested in standards-conforming and freely distributable IP
| Security software should consider grabbing the NRL IPsec software for 4.4-Lite
| BSD (which supports IPsec with both IPv4 and IPv6), which is available from
| several places including:
|         ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ipv6/nrl/
|  
| If you need dynamic key management for IPsec, then a technically superior
| alternative to SKIP is ISAKMP with Oakley extensions.  A freely distributable
| implementation of ISAKMP+Oakley that will drop on top of the NRL software is
| available by telneting to port 7600 on ftp-eng.cisco.com and following the
| instructions there.
|  
| Ran
| rja@cisco.com


I will be away from my e-mail for the next 3-4 days, so I
will be unable to respond for this period of time.

Regards,
Ashar.