Cryptographic Suites for IPsec
RFC 4308
Document | Type | RFC - Proposed Standard (December 2005; Errata) | |
---|---|---|---|
Author | Paul Hoffman | ||
Last updated | 2020-01-21 | ||
Stream | Internent Engineering Task Force (IETF) | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized (tools) htmlized with errata bibtex | ||
Stream | WG state | (None) | |
Document shepherd | No shepherd assigned | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 4308 (Proposed Standard) | |
Action Holders |
(None)
|
||
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | Russ Housley | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group P. Hoffman Request for Comments: 4308 VPN Consortium Category: Standards Track December 2005 Cryptographic Suites for IPsec Status of This Memo This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2005). Abstract The IPsec, Internet Key Exchange (IKE), and IKEv2 protocols rely on security algorithms to provide privacy and authentication between the initiator and responder. There are many such algorithms available, and two IPsec systems cannot interoperate unless they are using the same algorithms. This document specifies optional suites of algorithms and attributes that can be used to simplify the administration of IPsec when used in manual keying mode, with IKEv1 or with IKEv2. 1. Introduction This document is a companion to IPsec [RFC2401] and its two key exchange protocols, IKE [RFC2409] and IKEv2 [IKEv2]. Like most security protocols, IPsec, IKE, and IKEv2 allow users to chose which cryptographic algorithms they want to use to meet their security needs. Implementation experience with IPsec in manual key mode and with IKE has shown that there are so many choices for typical system administrators to make that it is difficult to achieve interoperability without careful pre-agreement. Because of this, the IPsec Working Group agreed that there should be a small number of named suites that cover typical security policies. These suites may be presented in the administrative interface of the IPsec system. These suites, often called "UI suites" ("user interface suites"), are optional and do not prevent implementers from allowing individual selection of the security algorithms. Hoffman Standards Track [Page 1] RFC 4308 Cryptographic Suites for IPsec December 2005 Although the UI suites listed here are optional to implement, this document is on the standards track because implementers who call particular suites by the names used here have to conform to the suites listed in this document. These suites should not be considered extensions to IPsec, IKE, and IKEv2, but instead administrative methods for describing sets of configurations. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", and "MAY" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. 2. UI Suites This section lists optional, non-mandatory suites that may be presented to system administrators to ease the burden of choosing among the many options in IPsec systems. These suites cannot cover all of the options that an administrator needs to select. Instead, they give values for a subset of the options. Note that these UI suites are simply collections of values for some options in IPsec. Use of UI suites does not change the IPsec, IKE, or IKEv2 protocols in any way. Specifically, the transform substructure in IKE and IKEv2 must be used to give the value for each specified option regardless of whether or not UI suites are used. Implementations that use UI suites SHOULD also provide a management interface for specifying values for individual cryptographic options. That is, it is unlikely that UI suites are a complete solution for matching the security policies of many IPsec users, and therefore an interface that gives a more complete set of options should be used as well. IPsec implementations that use these UI suites SHOULD use the suite names listed here. IPsec implementations SHOULD NOT use names different than those listed here for the suites that are described, and MUST NOT use the names listed here for suites that do not match these values. These requirements are necessary for interoperability. Note that the suites listed here are for use of IPsec in virtual private networks. Other uses of IPsec will probably want to define their own suites and give them different names. Additional suites can be defined by RFCs. The strings used to identify UI suites are registered by IANA. Hoffman Standards Track [Page 2] RFC 4308 Cryptographic Suites for IPsec December 2005 2.1. Suite "VPN-A" This suite matches the commonly used corporate VPN security used in IKEv1 at the time of this document's publication. IPsec: Protocol Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) [RFC2406] ESP encryption TripleDES in CBC mode [RFC2451]Show full document text