"ISAKMP" flaws?

[Florian Weimer]

* Peter Gutmann:

>>> I haven't been following the IPSec mailing lists of late -- can anyone
>>> who knows details explain what the issue is?
>>
>>These bugs have been uncovered by a PROTOS-style test suite.  Such test
>>suites can only reveal missing checks for boundary conditions, leading to
>>out- of-bounds array accesses and things like that.  In other words, trivial
>>implementation errors which can be easily avoided using proper programming
>>tools.
>
> I feel a need to comment on statements like this... at several times
> in the past I've seen people make sweeping generalisation like this,
> "Everyone knows about this security weakness, this { paper | article
> | security alert } isn't { novel | interesting | worth publishing }",

Touché.

> or some variant thereof (in this case "these trivial errors are
> easily avoided").

Of course, the relevance of a bug and how easily it could have been
avoided are completely different matters.  I mainly wanted to point
out that there is no new cryptography involved.

> What makes these statements rather unconvincing is that the majority
> of all implementations out there all make these trivial
> easily-avoided errors

They have chosen different trade-offs, focusing on performance,
time-to-market and things like that.  It's hard enough to create an
ISAKMP implementation that works at all.

> In this particular case if the problem is so trivial and easily
> avoided, why does almost every implementation (according to the
> security advisory) get it wrong?

How many completely independent implementations are there?

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