Subject: [saag] Thank you, Sam

From: Nicolas Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:50:11 -0500

Sam,

First, I want to thank you for all your work as AD these past three
years, to say nothing of your friendship for the past six.

At today's SAAG meeting I was slightly confused by one of your slides,
the one where you labelled BTNS IPsec interfaces work and channel
bindings "successes."  My first reaction was "but we're not done!"

But as a hall conversation following SAAG showed me, we have indeed
succeeded in some key respects: many now understand channel binding and
its value and seek to apply it, and many understand that IPsec requires
APIs, and simple APIs mind you, to be truly useful for end-to-end
security.

And then I think about how hard it was just to get the BTNS WG spun up.

And I recall that you first suggested channel binding to IPsec as the
solution for the NFS w/ RDDP security XOR performance issues, way back
in March 2003, five years ago, almost to the day, at Connectathon '03.

Now we're almost done with the relevant specs.  No, we're not yet done
with running code, but we'll get there too.

Therefore I'm no longer confused, I believe you're correct, those have
been successes, both, in merely getting started, and in getting them to
be taken seriously.

And I must say, none of that would have happened without your help for
the past five years.

But for my temporary confusion I would have stood up and said all this
at the mic.

Thank you so very much.

I wish you all the best in your new endeavours, and look forward to
seeing you again.

Nico
--