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RE: Traffic handling and key management "divide and coquer"
At 7:12 PM -0700 8/15/01, Alex Alten wrote:
>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.
>
Just a couple of observations:
NIST didn't have an open vote for AES. A small committee picked the winner.
DNSSEC is not being successful by almost any measure.
Steve
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