Re: [hackathon] Open Source Software and network protocol standards

On Mar 20, 2022, at 19:55, Robert Moskowitz <rgm@labs.htt-consult.com> wrote:

I stand corrected. My hearsay seems to have been a tad subjective. As always it’s great to hear IETF histories from the people who we actually there !

Paul

> 
> I ran MOST of those early IPsec/IKEv1 interop sessions until I wasn't.   Running them, that is.
> 
> Michael and Tero were there for most of it, but Cisco, FTP Software, SSH, Checkpoint, NIST!, were as key along with FreeSWAN.
> 
> I would say that the need for Inter-vendor connections (between companies running different products) was as much of a driver as open software for vpn use.  Further, that open vpn use was the beneficiary of commercial needs.
> 
> Lots of interesting history of the early 'hackathons'.  In our first in Dallas, hosted by MCI, we found that we could not get SHA1 interop between to code libraries.  One had the endian wrong!
> 
> Then in another, we blew the fuse on power draw for all the network gear and computers.  Some lost coding.
> 
> Also it was 'fun' (not) to get security code back out of the US at that time.  SSH was faxing their diffs back home and wiping their drives to get them out of the US.
> 
> Later interops were using FreeSwan as a target, but that was after the first interops worked out the kinks.
> 
> 
>> On 3/20/22 10:01, Paul Wouters wrote:
>> 
>>> Subject: Re: [hackathon] Open Source Software and network protocol standards
>> 
>>> My intuition is that in recent years Open Source Software has had a significant impact on network protocol standards, both in the availability of easily accessible open implementations contributing to the success of network protocol standards, and, in contrast, the lack of easily accessible open implementations contributing to less success for those network protocol standards.
>> 
>> For IKEv1 / IPsec there were a number of "bake off" [tm][r] events where
>> FreeSWAN was the main interop target for all commercial implementations
>> for a number of years in the late '90s.
>> 
>> The software and protocol were evolving/implementing at the same time.
>> 
>> Paul
>> 
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