Re: Last ditch proposal for crypto suites

[Paul Koning <pkoning@equallogic.com>]

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com> writes:

 Eric> Paul Koning <pkoning@equallogic.com> writes:
 >> At least 75% of that quantity comes from obsolete political
 >> considerations. If you delete all "*export*" and all DES and DES40
 >> suites, the list is pretty small.
 Eric> I'm not sure what you mean by political considerations.

 Eric> The only political considerations I know of in the original
 Eric> SSLv3 documents were the export cipher suites. There were
 Eric> perfectly good reasons to have DES, 3DES, and RC4 (though the
 Eric> reasons for DES are diminished by AES).

I was mostly referring to the export control stuff, and you're right,
that's only about a third of the total. 

Then again, while there may have been fairly good reasons back then to
include DES, those clearly no longer apply.

 Eric> I suspect you may be referring to the DH/DSS cipher suites as
 Eric> well. I don't know for sure why those were there, but I don't
 Eric> believe that it was in fact political, since it was done before
 Eric> DH/DSS went royalty free and Netscape had an RSA license
 Eric> anyway.

I wasn't, but that's another place where the situation has changed
significantly. 

The summary point I would make is this: SSL has a long list of suites
for a lot of reasons.  A lot of these are no longer applicable, and
some of the rest don't apply to IPsec.  (For example, RC4 is a
sensible cipher for SSL, but not applicable to IPsec.)  Trying to
argue against suites based on the length of the SSL suite list is
misleading.

      paul