Re: [Tcpcrypt] New version of the charter text

[Tero Kivinen <[e-mail]>]

John-Mark Gurney writes:
> The goal is to make it very easy for everyone to deploy...  Configuring
> IPSEC is a pain, and as Joe mentions, most implementations don't handle
> key roll over properly (even though apparently, you're allowed to keep
> both the old key and the new key around for the transition period to
> handle this case)...

Of course there can be buggy IPsec implementations which do not follow
the rules set in the RFCs and which loose some packets when doing
rekeying, but same applies to any protocol.

The current IPsec specifications (IKEv2, RFC5996) do specify how rekey
happens and it is specified so that no packets are lost: i.e. first
create new Child SA proactively, i.e. before the old Child SA expires;
then wait for traffic to move to this new SA (i.e. when you see
packets on new Child SA, you know that other end has installed it);
and only then remove old Child SA.

See section 2.8 of RFC 5996.

In the IKEv1 (from 1998, obsoleted in 2005) the rekeying was not
specified properly and there quite often was problems with
implementations which caused them to loose some packets while
rekeying. Usually those old implementations did work properly against
themselves, but when talking to someone else which implemented things
differently they might have lost few packets. 
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