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Re: Question on Extension Header Order




Charles Lynn made an important observation.  To followup...

In IPv6-land, I believe that IPsec AH should appear before (outside)
ESP.  If one desires both integrity/authentication and confidentiality
on data contained by IPsec ESP, then one should use an ESP transform that
incorporates those features. [1]  IPsec AH inside ESP is incapable of
providing the intended protections (namely: to protect the invariant
fields of the IPv6 header in addition to the upper-protocol data).

To the extent that the current IPsec drafts do not say this, I believe
those drafts would be technically flawed.  I would be interested in hearing
what other IPv6 IPsec implementers believe, if there are any other
IPv6 IPsec implementers.

Ran
rja@inet.org


[1] Because of the published attack in [Bellovin96], I personally am of
    the opinion that ESP should _always_ require an integrated strong
    integrity/authentication mechanism.


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