Status of opportunistic encryption

[Sandy Harris]

Some years back I worked on the FreeS/WAN project (freeswan.org),
IPsec for Linux.

One of our goals was to implement "opportunistic encryption", to allow any two
appropriately set up machines to communicate securely, without pre-arrangement
between the two system administrators. Put authentication keys in DNS; they
look those up and can then use IKE to do authenticated Diffie-Hellman to create
the keys for secure links.

Recent news stories seem to me to make it obvious that anyone with privacy
concerns (i.e. more-or-less everyone) should be encrypting as much of their
communication as possible. Implementing opportunistic encryption is the
best way I know of to do that for the Internet.

I'm somewhat out of touch, though, so I do not know to what extent people
are using it now. That is my question here.

I do note that there are some relevant RFCs.

RFC 4322 Opportunistic Encryption using the Internet Key Exchange (IKE)
RFC 4025 A Method for Storing IPsec Keying Material in DNS

and that both of FreeS/WAN's successor projects (openswan.org and
strongswan.org) mention it in their docs. However, I don't know if it
actually being used.

-- 
Sandy Harris
Zhuhai, Guangdong, China

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