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Re: IPsec re-defining IP-in-IP?



In <1352.892162945@ux6.sp.cs.cmu.edu> (message from Dave Johnson on
Thu, 09 Apr 1998 19:02:25 -0400), Dave Johnson <dbj@cs.cmu.edu> writes: 

> Agreed!  In fact, since RFC 2003 is already a Proposed Standard, 
> it is already the official protocol 4, so any other similar protocol
> defined by IPsec would need to be a different protocol number.
> Before we get into such an escalation of essentially redundant 
> protocol number assignments, if there is some reason that RFC 2003
> doesn't do what IPsec needs (or any other protocol that needs
> IP-in-IP-like behavior), we should talk about it.  If there are 
> some minor revisions that can be made to 2003, please let us (the
> Mobile IP Working Group, who defined 2003) know about it.

I finally looked up rfc2003, which I hadn't bothered to do so far, as
I have been developing protocols that do IP encapsulation since
~1990, first in my Mobile IP protocols and then swIPe, the precursor
to IPSEC, all long before 2003 was written.

I was surprised to notice that there were no references to any of that
work in rfc2003 (for example, my Sigcomm'91 paper (joint paper with
Maguire and Duchamp), my winter Usenix'93 paper (joint paper with
Maguire), my 4th Usenix Security symposium paper (joint paper with
Blaze), not to mention my 1993 PhD thesis!).

This omission is particularly surprising in light of the fact that the
editor of 2003 is Charlie Perkins, who has been very familiar with
my work since at least 1990, and other members of the MobileIP working
group would also have been expected to have known about it.

There are more missing references, other than those to my own work:
the MBONE people have been using prococol 4 instead of source routing
to do multicast tunneling since the meltdown at the December '92
IETF. There are no references to any of that either.

I'm mentioning all this because the IETF community traditionally has
been very careful to give credit where credit is due and to reference
the work upon which protocols are based (to rfc2003's credit, rfc1853
by Bill Simpson *is* referenced (which, in turn, does reference the
Sigcomm and the swIPe papers), as is rfc1826, which references
RFC1825, which references the swIPe paper). I trust that when the
mobile-ip protocols move to the next stage of the standardization
process, care will be taken to ensure that proper references are
made. I will be happy to supply all the citations that I'm aware of.

Regards,

/ji


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