-*- emacs-wiki -*-

In October of 2002, just prior to the feature freeze of the Linux 2.6 kernel,
an effort appeared to bring IPsec into the mainstream of the Linux 2.6
kernel.

The group decided for a variety of reasons not to import the KLIPS code,
but to start anew.  Well, sort of. The group actually imported a lot of BSD
KAME code, but also rewrote a lot.

As the code was US "tainted", the FreeS/WAN project could not just adopt it.
In the meantime, Xelerance and the Libreswan fork was formed, and the US taint
issue was not relevant. Many people asked why we bothered to maintain the
KLIPS code.

There are a number of answers: the major one for most of 2003 and 2004 was
the NETKEY code (as we have decided to call the the 2.6 code) was just not
mature enough yet. That is no longer the case and there are many advantages
to the NETKEY code. They are:
   a) full support for CryptoAPI 1.0
   b) SMP-safe and SMP-optimized
   c) makes most use of skbuff structure, and can deal with chained
      skbuff's without linearing them.
   d) IPv6 support.
   e) integrated into stack.

There are a number of disadvantages of the NETKEY code. They are:
      a) uses KAME model of grabbing packets in ip_output().
      b) uses horrible "setkey" interface to SPD.
      c) overly RFC2401 limited in operation
      d) is not yet fully integrated into ULP (TCP/UDP)

Let's look at these things one at a time:

* Packet grabbing
  
  The #1 hassle of running IPsec on BSD systems (MCR did this for four years
  before joining the FreeS/WAN team) is that it is impossible even for
  experts to debug. The simple reason is: no tcpdump.

  The nicest things about the stoopid routing tricks method of packet capture
  for KLIPS is the ability to tcpdump on the ipsec0 device to determine what
  is going on.

  There are some additional advantages --- it vastly simplifies firewalling.
  NETKEY only got extensions to permit iptables to do things at all in 2.6.16,
  and the methods of doing this are difficult to get right.

* setkey interface

  The setkey interface is a very thin layer on top of the RFC2367. RFC2367
  predates RFC2401, and in fact the setkey interface while appearing to
  be RFC2401 compliant, actually is not. The whole mechanism is therefore
  not only overly complicated and obtuse, but is not even compliant to
  the specifications.

  The other part of this is that it comes from the early 1990s
  pre-automatic-keying (IKE) IPsec version of IPsec. The policies were all
  places in the kernel, with the userland keying daemon only a slave (helper)
  to the kernel, instead of being centrally in charge of policy.

  This method is okay if one is only building site-to-site VPNs, but fails
  due to complexity when other types of policies (such as even, basic remote
  access for road warriors with dynamic IPs) is implemented.

  The setkey interface is just not rich enough to do things, and making
  it richer is inappropriate --- the complexity belongs in userspace, not in
  the kernel.

  NETKEY comes with a second interface, the Netlink interface, but
  essentially, it does not radically change the system. However, since it
  has no legacy baggage, extending it would be much easier.

* RFC2401 limitations

  Even if we update setkey to be RFC2401 compliant, that in itself is a
  dubious place to stop. Not only is RFC4301 out, but even that can't
  accomodate a lot of what is really needed.

  Instead, multiple methods of setting up firewall policy are needed.
  What is not needed is another firewall, which the SPD actually represents.

* Upper layer Protocols 

  TCP and UDP would very much like to know how to efficiently deal with
  "connection latching" of streams. I.e. if the first packet of a stream
  arrives protected, then the rest of the stream should, and the outgoing
  stream should also be protected.

  We need to do this even for transport-mode SAs that cross NATs. That 
  means, specifically for the case where there are two peers behind two
  NATs that have the same private network address. Why? because 90% of the
  end nodes on the Internet have 192.168.1.101 as their IP address, and
  doing things like protecting peer2peer traffic is something that
  should be possible, even common.


THE PROPOSAL
============

Since we like the insides of NETKEY, and the outsides of KLIPS, and
the insides of KLIPS are a rotten pit of despair.... let's rip the inside of
KLIPS out, and interface directly to the lower levels of NETKEY.

{see files diagrams/KLIPS.fig, diagrams/KLIPS_decap.fig, diagrams/NETKEY.fig,
       and diagrams/KLIPSKEY.fig}

{XXX - the idea of the rest of this document is to show how KLIPS is
currently structured, how it may change in the near future, how NETKEY
is structured, and how the interesting and useful parts of NETKEY can be
incorporated into KLIPS, replacing the ugly parts.}

{ZZZ - to be determined is how the upper parts of NETKEY may want to
change}

     


  

