You could skip the depressive nostalgia-inducing (and not in a good way) Slashdot thread, and link the source:<p><a href="http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...</a><p>Although, that had just been submitted by danieldk:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6346531" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6346531</a><p>So maybe you had a reason to make us sift through /. noise.
One of the posters re-posted a comment that this is a fragment of:<p>"The Internet was built on, and runs on, trust. Every postmaster, every network engineer, every webmaster, every system admin, every hostmaster, everyone crafting standards, everyone writing code, trusts that everyone else -- no matter how vehemently they disagree on a technical point -- is acting in good faith. The NSA, in its enormous arrogance, has single-handedly destroyed much of that trust overnight."<p>Commerce also runs on trust. The US dollar bill is a promise backed by debt...<p>In one case, I am seeing more evidence not to trust the US authorities. In the other, I am seeing evidence not to trust the US financial structure.<p>This current age is getting really strange/disquieting/fragile to me... (I reside in the US) Am I one of only a few? Or many?<p>It's feeling like that slippery slope when conspiracy theories start being found out as truth...
IPsec is complex, so complex that it doesn't work properly. Go in shop, by 10 different firewalls, and then try to cross connect those using IPsec. I'm sure you're going to have fun time. After you manage to get the SAs connected, you'll find out that those tunnels work unreliably, connecting, disconnecting, state machine & key renegotiation totally broken etc. If it's not crap on paper, at least it is in reality. I've been using IPsec with over 50 different devices and I find it to be real pain point. Some devices do not offer all options in UI, but still have hidden values for those built in, which you don't know and need to figure out by trian and error. Devices like ZyWALL (Zyxel) and WatchGuard, StoneGate (Stonesoft) etc, have constant probelms with IPsec.
If you want real challenge, things get much worse if you're using aggressive mode and dynamic IPs with DDNS etc. Then it's total disaster, even many firewalls from same manufacturer won't work properly.
I just now have two ZyWALL USG 1000 boxes, that can't maintain reliable IPsec main mode tunnel between those, even if there's no network issues. There's simply something wrong with the software.
Old whines: <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25350958-Zywall-35-vs-USG-100-IPsec-issues" rel="nofollow">http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25350958-Zywall-35-vs-USG-1...</a>
About null cipher downgrade attacks, simply don't allow "multiple proposals", then what's specified has to be exact match. (Or in some cases, there' list of options, which means that any option like null sipher isn't allowed.)
And here is the link to the real content:
<a href="http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...</a>
Bad headline. Here's what he actually said:<p>"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."
I'm really beginning to think that the Snowden leaks came up too late, and the "intelligence-industrial-complex" might already be too big to dismantle.
I am thinking that we shouldn't take it personally(other than the fact that they made systems vulnerable to hackers, Chicom spies etc.)<p>If their job is to crack codes, our job should be to make unbreakable codes. Nothing personal, just bidness ;)
All I see here is a lot of claims with zero evidence. And some of those points e.g. a non encrypted mode seem entirely reasonable for testing purposes.<p>And wouldn't end to end encryption be pointless if you are trying to secure a mobile connection since the NSA has hooks into the provider's core infrastructure ?