Subject: [midcom] SIMCO with IPSec

From: Stephen Lyda <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 13:35:14 -0500

Greetings,

I was wondering if someone could elaborate on the need for the use of
IPSec with the SIMCO protocol.

If this protocol is designed to be light-weight and usable with lower
end middleboxes, then I do not understand why IPSec encapsulation would
be a firm requirement for all messages.

For the most part, it seems to me that SIMCO messages are going to be
traveling on a local, firewalled, network...and not vulerable to many
malicious attacks from the outside world.

It seems SIMCOs session establishment messages would be adequate enough
to authenticate the SIMCO agent with the middlebox.  The middlebox would
also have the option to reject or select configurations set up by the agent.

-Stephen

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From: Martin Stiemerling <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2005 11:05:11 +0200

Hi Stephen,

--On Dienstag, 2. August 2005 13:35 Uhr -0500 Stephen Lyda 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

| Greetings,
|
| I was wondering if someone could elaborate on the need for the use of
| IPSec with the SIMCO protocol.
|
| If this protocol is designed to be light-weight and usable with lower
| end middleboxes, then I do not understand why IPSec encapsulation would
| be a firm requirement for all messages.
|
| For the most part, it seems to me that SIMCO messages are going to be
| traveling on a local, firewalled, network...and not vulerable to many
| malicious attacks from the outside world.
|
| It seems SIMCOs session establishment messages would be adequate enough
| to authenticate the SIMCO agent with the middlebox.  The middlebox would
| also have the option to reject or select configurations set up by the
| agent.

SIMCO works fine in all scenarios  and basically there two cases to 
distinguish:

1) running SIMCO in an "unsafe" environment, e.g., over the
Internet or in local Ethernet-based network with shared links
2) running SIMCO in a closed/controlled environment.

You are referring to case 2). In this case there is indeed no need
to run SIMCO over IPsec. IPsec is recommended to be used in case 1.
However, it is up to you to decided whether you run SIMCO over IPsec
or not.

  Martin

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From: Stephen Lyda <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2005 10:23:05 -0500

Martin,

It really was not clear to me reading the latest draft that IPSec was an
option.

Thank you for the clarification.

-Stephen