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Crypto and IPSec Merged into 2.5
Corbet writes "Linus has just merged the new crypto API and IPSec implementation into his 2.5 BitKeeper tree. This is the first time that serious cryptographic code has made an appearance in the mainline kernel, and it will hopefully lead to more secure communications for all Linux users in the future."
I really like the way the 2.5 kernel is progressing, a lot of the patches that I've been applying manually to the 2.4 tree have already been merged into the main tree of the 2.5 kernel.
:)
Can't wait until release, this thing is going to rock.
Why would superior theft abilities become part of kernel-proper?
Oh, you said crypto!
Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, B3H 3J5
Jon.
how does exportation work with this? i thought people weren't allowed to export code w/ serious type crypto in it.
Too bad that full ipsec, such as provided by
Freeswan is still not in the kernel. I find it a
bit sad that Dave Miller and John Gilmore can't
figure out a proper way to resolve their problem
(John wants no US hands on the code, Dave wants
no code he can't touch in the kernel)
But at least the beginning is there, and if the
USAGI ipsec gets in, it should learn to talk to the userland tools, such as Freeswan, because Freeswan has extra features that "stock ipsec" doesn't have, such as Opportunistic Encryption.
This is great that these things are comming as standard in the kernel, but so many things are "standard" now its getting pretty large for joe-schmo average user who will get a full kitchen sink kernel with their distro.
This is also great for creating products like VPN gateways et al, but is it time to consider a different structure for kernel builds, with modules being seperately managed with a smarter installation procedure.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
IPv6 has "builtin" IPSec
PHP is to immature. Basic has been around forever. So I offer the first line of code:
10 rem *** Basic Linux kernel Implementation ***
Forseeable problems are many but the biggest is:
A) Basic needs an interpreter
B) Interpreter needs an OS
C) OS written on Basic might be tricky
I'll stick with FreeBSD thanks. And then there's OpenBSD and NetBSD for fully implemented IPSec and IPv6.
FreeSWAN barely talks to anything but itself, yet I can get FreeBSD's IPSec to talk to Cisco routers and do other things. Other things that are well-documented too, and there are no physical tussles over the code and where it goes.
For FreeBSD, I add IPSEC, IPSEC_DEBUG, and IPSEC_ESP to the kernel, recompile and install the kernel, and I'm ready to go. Adding IPv6 support is equally simple.
Plus, most of the applications that I use (mail, irc, ssh, etc...) already use both tcp4 and tcp6 sockets.
You linux guys are still lagging (IMO) with IPSec.
Whatever.
countries with harsh import/export restrictions on crypto code? What will the impacts on
developers and users in those places be?
If not, can our government do something about it? I remember that during the cold war we successfully prevented our high grade crypto getting into the hands of the warsaw pact. Could we do the same thing now?
I only found this out recently, but the freeswan.org site lags behind the actual development of freeswan quite a lot. A nice friendly guy runs freeswan.ca, and keeps it chockablock with all the latest patches and stuff.
I've mirrored the downloads as they're so useful.
Get your own free personal location tracker
In my experience, Windows 2000's support for IPSec is one reason why it has snared a foothold in many businesses. Having IPSec in mainstream Linux distributions would let us cut Bill off at the pass.
I hope we're not far from seeing adoption of Linux in places like the financial services industry. If the distributors can make IPSec painless to configure, Linux will make inroads in such industries very quickly.
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
So other than ease of installation, what advantages are there to building this in the kernel?
I'm sure I'm dense but I don't understand.
and leave the comedy to the experts
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Oh man...
First ICQ and AIM merge.
Then Crypto and IPSec merge.
Next you're gonna tell me that cats and dogs have merged.
What's the world coming to?
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Does this create any export ramifications since Linus ( and i assume the code he reviews/packages )is now located here in the states?
Just curious.. i know how hard of a time everyone else ( like BSD ) has with this garbage.
Information should never be restricted on the basis of governmental boundries. Phfft.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
so we can't sell encryption to our enemies, but giving it to them is fine? ;)
This comment was generated by a squadron of trained super elite albino ninja chickens for you.
If you need answers quick and easy, well that is why you have paid consultants. Go hire them. Till then SHUT UP & RTFM.
Imagine if some legislator somewhere decided that this new crypto API (though it's for legitimate reasons) is somehow to be classified as a munitions and thus is a crime to export to other countries. He circulates a letter which his trusting co-legislators sign blindly. A week after its passing Linus gets locked up for anti-American activities. Alan Cox gets shipped to Guantanamo. Somewhere in Redmond a bowl-cut, bespectacled man cackles gleefully.
Exporting Stephen Hawking requires a lot more effort!
Anyone know if this will support VPN's using IPSEC wjhere either peer may be behind 1 or more firewalls? Right now, this has become an issue for a project I'm working on, and we're havin all sorts of issues. Thanks
So, by the time we hit 2.6 this will be a 100M download?
i remember seeing that osx provided IPSEC since 10.1 or 10.2, so they beat linux.
Anyone know how the osx IPSEC compares to whats going into 2.5?
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
Yes. IIRC IPSec originated as a part of the IPv6 specification. Since then it has been backported to IPv4. This is a little unfortunate because that might actually slow down the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Had IPv6 been a requirement to use IPSec, we might have seen IPv6 getting adopted a little faster.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
The only reason I can think of why you want this, is when you have a dynamic IP address and you want to use a Preshared key. Get a fixed IP or start using X.509 certs.
Aggressive Mode exposes some information, plus it might make DDoS easier to do.
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
Ive been using Freeswan for the last few months (1.98b) + quite a few patches (found them at www.freeswan.ca ) to get the results I need. How does this factor in to this equation? Is this a stupid-simple implementation that will also need lots of patches to be able to do what I need it to do (ie x509 certs, NAT transversal, DHCP over VPN) ?
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
One man's bloat is another man's features.
Hypothetical: I can't believe OpenOffice is so bloated compared to EDLIN from MS-DOS!
Maybe it's "feature loaded" instead of bloated? While it is true that you can use OpenOffice to duplicate tasks that you might have done in EDLIN, it is capable of so much more.
There is another kind of bloat which is not caused by features. This kind of bloat does not appear to be present in Linux. The kind of bloat I'm talking about is caused by "optimization". I don't mean optimizing for fast code or small code, but optimizing for "release date". Hey Mr. Customer, would take that new spreadsheet upgrade six months sooner if it required 25% more computing resources to run? All consumers I know would answer Yes. So this is a type of optimization. Optimizing for development time instead of optimizing for computer resources. Given the current low and decreasing cost of computer resources, there is some balance of this that makes sense. Just as once upon a time the "bloat" and value of high level programming languages was hugely debated. Now everyone uses high level languages to optimize for development time. The fact that I could spend six extra months doing it smaller and faster in assembler doesn't matter. Well, today it's the same thing. I don't mean that bad code is written on purpose, just that development time is valued above comptuer resources and machine optimizations, profiling, etc. Again, Linux does not appear to "suffer" from this type of "optimization".
Another type of bloat is just from plain bad programming. It was not a purposeful decision to optimize development time, it was just the the program is badly written. Linux does not appear to suffer from this kind of bloat either.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Basic needs an interpreter
t ion
Oh, I see. That should be BASIC.
Beginners
All-purpose
Symbolic
Instruc
Code
Linus has yet to post a message to linux-kernel since his return, but he continues to merge patches at a high rate.
What's cool about this is that people are watching kernel development without having to read the lkml or being on irc or whatever. People can now just watch the patches flow into the bk system. I think that's kind of cool. It's like a Kernel News Network.
www.rdex.net
I run solaris at my office, and i need binaries damn it.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Wouldn't this run afoul of many of the U.S. Cryptography export regulations? U.S. DoD prohibits exporting of any product containing mathematically "strong" cryptography (usually, 128-bit) to a lot of places.
That, and the DMCA which prohibits reversing of any of the encryption that would be found in the new kernel, would create a risk for many of the users downloading the software if they were from anywhere outside the US (and, for US users downloading the software, because it couldn't be explained to them.)
I'm sure the U.S. government is going to have a lot of fun with this...
There are no such things as fundamental rights. nowhere, never. Have a nice day.:{)||
If only the people who got those Perl RSA tattoos could have known...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Or the banning of Linux in several countries. Whichever comes first, you know.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
My un-favorite types of Bloat: :{)||
- In Apps, Games, whatever, it would be a lot nicer to be able to add features, rather than have the whole bloated thing copied/downloaded/installed onto your drive. (Cygwin has a nice setup.exe program that actually lets the user *pick* what he wants *before* the download. Very nice.)
- Programs that say "Standby while we figure out what system you are running" and then copy every bloated driver for every type system, and its various peripherals, that ever existed onto your hard drive, anyway. Maybe this is not a problem anymore with the huge disks that exists these days, but it does signify sloppy development work that is usually mirrored in the app.
You are so 1337! I bet supermodels line up to have your babies!
I am not very knowledgeable about security issues, but I am curious if the inclusion of security modules in the kernel will provide for a single point of failure. In other words, as more programs become dependent on the kernel module for security, if an exploit becomes available, will all these dependent programs become exploitable?
I ask this specifically because of the problem the IE ran into, where it depended on security APIs from Windows, the Windows API had an exploitable bug, and ta-da, IE had an exploitable bug.First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
It couldn't be Linus Van Pelt...hmmm..who else might it be?
Oh yeah, that Linus. What, he's like Prince and Madonna now, only needs one name?
It should satisfy most users wanting a static secure VPN, and it is not nearly as bloated as frees/wan. http://ringstrom.mine.nu
Why da heck are not those two included?
The verb form of Exportation is of course Exportationize. This leads to the new java construct:
importationize javax.swing.*;
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
:-)
Thanks for the laugh, Yakoff.
I agree. Bush bashing is Bush league. Shrubbery for President; it isn't capable of understanding the issues, either. See the new movie, Bowling for Columbine. Many people think there is no need to try to understand when you live in a country that can bomb people.
It appeared that the OS for most apple2 applications was BASIC. There was the CP/M side as well, but I think at least 99% of my apple2 games, when you boot off the disk the OS is BASIC.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
Linux is not a trademark, it's copyrighted by Linus Torvalds.
All this means is that you can't make a frying pan and sell it as "Linux"
Haha why is it that every time your article says Linux it has the TM there? Linux isn't a trademark. Windows and Microsoft also should be annotated in your article as copyright material, just like Linux is.
But Linux *is* a trademark, see linuxmark.org for details...
Who gives a fat fuck? Linux is dying.
Thats because nobody gives a rats ass. Anything that certifies the security of Windows is obviously a joke.
The cryptoAPI is the real kicker here folks.
/dev/random will no longer us its own crypto librtaries (SHA-1). IPSec will not use its own crypto (well, freeswan will because they feel there's value there).
.so's can have their digital signature verified before execution), and other majic stuff.
Once cryptoAPI is in the kernel,
CryptoAPI will also permit people to have encrypted filesystems, swap partitions, even BOOT partitions.
Present applications include: eliminate duplicated code, harmonize/facilitate crypto in the kernel, encrypted file systems, swap paritions, cdroms, etc., "turnkey" ipsec
Later applications include: load-time code-signing (that is all binaries and
JLC
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The two big interoperability problems for FreeS/WAN have been explicit non-support for Aggressive Mode (they don't support it, mainly because there are security problems that affect the general user that don't affect most commercial applications), and lack of support for various proprietary authentication systems (not that I've been thrilled with their Opportunistic Encryption work, since the versions I've seen assume levels of control over reverse DNS space that most people don't have.)
Their concerns for user-friendliness have been legendary ("First recompile your Linux kernel cleanly, then you can start to install the IPSEC stuff...." :-) It's not the same goals as other parts of the IPSEC vendor community ("First find the end of the brown wire with the two little prong-thingies and plug it into the electric socket in the wall. See Figure 37 if this is difficult for you.") Not surprising, because while they really do want everybody in the world to be able to communicate securely, they also had a lot of research to do on how to make things work well, and the world around them that they've had to support has been changing rapidly while they were working - it's been a lot like changing the tires on a moving truck, while your users are rebuilding the truck and other people are rebuilding the road or inventing chemistry for vulcanizing rubber. If it's not always obvious why their work has been so critically important and valuable, well, it has been anyway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks