Speaking as someone who followed the IPSEC IETF standards committee pretty closely, while leading a group that tried to implement it and make so usable that it would be used by default throughout the Internet, I noticed some things:

* NSA employees participted throughout, and occupied leadership roles in the committee and among the editors of the documents * Every once in a while, someone not an NSA employee, but who had longstanding ties to NSA, would make a suggestion that reduced privacy or security, but which seemed to make sense when viewed by people who didn't know much about crypto. For example, using the same IV (initialization vector) throughout a session, rather than making a new one for each packet. Or, retaining a way to for this encryption protocol to specify that no encryption is to be applied. * The resulting standard was incredibly complicated -- so complex that every real cryptographer who tried to analyze it threw up their hands and said, "We can't even begin to evaluate its security unless you simplify it radically". See for example: https://www.schneier.com/paper-ipsec.html That simplification never happened. The IPSEC standards also mandated support for the "null" encryption option (plaintext hiding in supposedly-encrypted packets), for 56-bit Single DES, and for the use of a 768-bit Diffie-Hellman group, all of which are insecure and each of which renders the protocol subject to downgrade attacks. * The protocol had major deployment problems, largely resulting from changing the maximum segment size that could be passed through an IPSEC tunnel between end-nodes that did not know anything about IPSEC. This made it unusable as a "drop-in" privacy improvement. * Our team (FreeS/WAN) built the Linux implementation of IPSEC, but at least while I was involved in it, the packet processing code never became a default part of the Linux kernel, because of bullheadedness in the maintainer who managed that part of the kernel. Instead he built a half-baked implementation that never worked. I have no idea whether that bullheadedness was natural, or was enhanced or inspired by NSA or its stooges. In other circumstances I also found situations where NSA employees explicitly lied to standards committees, such as that for cellphone encryption, telling them that if they merely debated an actually-secure protocol, they would be violating the export control laws unless they excluded all foreigners from the room (in an international standards committee!). The resulting paralysis is how we ended up with encryption designed by a clueless Motorola employee -- and kept secret for years, again due to bad NSA export control advice, in order to hide its obvious flaws -- that basically XOR'd each voice packet with the same bit string! Their "encryption" scheme for the control channel, CMEA, was almost as bad, being breakable with 2^24 effort and small numbers of ciphertexts: https://www.schneier.com/cmea-press.html To this day, no mobile telephone standards committee has considered or adopted any end-to-end (phone-to-phone) privacy protocols. This is because the big companies involved, huge telcos, are all in bed with NSA to make damn sure that working end-to-end encryption never becomes the default on mobile phones. John Gilmore _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography