David Reed has blogged an excellent response to Security Czar Richard Clarke’s recent screed in which he blamed all of the Internet’s woes on bad software, wireless networks, ISPs, and the gubmint. Everyone, it seems, except the NSA:
Quite a number of us who participated in the early Internet protocol design were from the computer security research side, and did our best to make the Internet architecture secure from the start. But the NSA (I am told) told DARPA that any attempt to introduce security mechanisms into TCP/IP’s architecture would be viewed very negatively. (This happened at about the same time that Rivest, et al. received a mysterious threatening letter from a senior military official claiming that their work on the RSA cipher must be stopped immediately)…
And in fact, IPSEC was later invented along similar lines, as an option. But part of the difficulty with implementing IPSEC is that it is too late – popular fads such as NAT and stateful inspection firewalls have been deployed too widely. Firewalls (which provide faux security at best) make real security much harder to deploy, because they require that end-systems expose too much information in the clear. Truly secure protocols (even IPSEC) don’t work very well with firewalls.