[Cryptography] IPsec DH parameters, other flaws

[Paul Wouters]

On Sun, 19 Jul 2020, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

> the people who made sure everyone with PKI knowledge was made unwelcome in DANE

Phillip,

The whole point of DNSSEC was to skip the PKI middle-men. When DANE was
looking to get serious, the WebPKI people litterally invaded the small
room we had looking for the red emergency shutdown button. It is not
that DANE needed X.509/webPKI expertise. The only part of x.509 was
that webservers had to keep serving keys in x.509 containers, and all
the tools handled x.509 containers and not raw public keys. So the
DANE record just needed to say "just pull the public key, and drop the
rest".

What happend was actually exactly what people who wouldn't want everyone
to have universal cryptography got, another delay of DANE and some
proposal more complicated than needed with the messy PKIX-EE/PKIX-CA
versys DANE-EE/DANE-PKIX. I had to fight Richard Barnes of BBN to
keep a DANE type that did not (need to) trust a CA, a battle that I
had to figh tall over again with him when doing tls-dnssec-chains,
which got at least 3 years delay because they blocked it in the TLS WG.

I'd say the reverse of what you claim, actually happened.

> , the folk who persuaded the IAB to dig their heels in and prevent deployment
> of DNSSEC in 2001, etc. etc.

I was not participating at IETF during this time, so I don't know, but I
do know I was the first Dutch ISP to run DNSSEC in production with 150
domains in the .nl.nl shadow tree, and the rollover issues were just
unsolved at that time. So I can see technical reasons why it was not
ready. I have no opinion or knowledge about the IAB motivation or
actions at that time though.

> There are a few individuals who seemed to be always there to pour poison in people's ears and to
> encourage them to 'stand their ground' when insisting on some asinine security requirement that
> makes the whole thing undeployable.

I'm pretty sure both you and I both feel that the two of us have  zero
chance of secretly working for goverments to prevent cryptographic
deployments to the masses.

Yet, the fact that we see the above in complete different ways, suggest
perhaps that instead of crediting NSA and GCHQ for the sabotaging our
communities, that our biggest enemy is in fact us, and not them.

> Take the decision to make sure IPSEC wouldn't pass through NAT. I am certain neither security AD
> at the time was working for the NSA. But someone managed to reinforce their prejudices against
> NAT and the result was a failed design. 

Again, I wasn't there for that, but the IETF really believed IPv6 would
be there soon and NAT would die and don't develop for it. I would again
not give credit to TLA's for the simple incomptence of the IETF[1] :)

Paul
[1] I include myself in that :)