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RE: Traffic handling and key management "divide and coquer"



At 01:20 AM 8/16/2001 +0100, Andrew Krywaniuk wrote:
...
>The IPsec WG has never been able to agree on requirements for anything. It
>seems idealistic and naive to believe that we could start over with a brand
>new KMP and acheive a different result. Like it or not, IKE was the
>preordained result of a design by commitee,a political process. The
>alternative to a committee process is a fascist process. Take your pick. I
>personally don't like either committees or facism, but I'll take committees
>any day of the week.
...

There is an alternative to committes or facism, the NIST approach (as in the
AES "beauty contest").  Let's lay out the requirements, then hold a "beauty
contest", and finally vote in a winner.  This way we aren't getting the 
"design by committee" effect that simply does not work for a security 
oriented protocol.

If you don't believe me, look what has happened to PEM, SNMPSEC, now IKE,
and possibly IPSEC itself. DNSSEC may be the only recent success, and that
was probably due to the small group involved. Our IETF WG consensus process
which works well when designing an insecure protocol standard doesn't work
properly when designing a secure protocol standard, at least not with a 
large group of stongly opinionated engineers.

Let's learn from our mistakes and try an approach that seems to work, 
the NIST one. 

- Alex

--

Alex Alten

Alten@Home.Com




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