On Aug 12, 2015, at 2:49 PM, Harald Alvestrand
<harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no> wrote:
On 08/12/2015 11:02 PM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
The reason I read it that way is because, in fact, none of the protocols
we developed at that time actually required strong cryptography. They
just assumed you would layer the right amount of cryptography underneath,
using one of the (at that time) non-IETF security protocols with appropriate
patent and export licensing.
I was in the room at the Danvers plenary, and that was not the
impression I got.
In particular, at that time many people believed very strongly that
IPSEC, an IETF protocol, would be THE most useful tool for achieving
security, once it was finished.
Yes, certainly. But, IPsec didn't require strong encryption be used;
it required an MTI algorithm of 56bit DES-CBC. IPsec had algorithm and
key length options, like everything else at the time.
RFC1825:
For interoperability throughout the worldwide Internet, all
conforming implementations of the IP Encapsulating Security Payload
MUST support the use of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in
Cipher-Block Chaining (CBC) Mode as detailed in the ESP
specification. Other confidentiality algorithms and modes may also
be implemented in addition to this mandatory algorithm and mode.
Export and use of encryption are regulated in some countries [OTA94].
Other RFCs at the time included RFC 1968, the PPP Encryption Control
Protocol, RFC 1969, the PPP DES Encryption Protocol, and RFC 1964, the
Kerberos Version 5 GSS-API mechanism.
RFC1968: "The strength of the protection
is dependent on the encryption algorithm used and the care with which
any 'secret' used by the encryption algorithm is protected."
All of this work was, of course, based on the premise that strong encryption
would be used when possible. It simply wasn't required. So, trying to read
such a requirement into RFC1984 doesn't make any sense, no matter how much
the reader might wish it to be true.
A cynic would say that they were just making different wrong assumption
from the one Roy observed, but people seemed to strongly believe that
the IETF was developing protocols that required strong cryptography.
I have no doubt that many people believed many things that they would have
found to be false had they bothered to check the details. I am sure I
believed many such things twenty years ago.
....Roy