Swan: Securing the Internet against Wiretapping
by FreeS/WAN project founder John Gilmore

The idea is to deploy PC-based boxes that will sit between your local area network and the Internet (near your firewall or router) which opportunistically encrypt your Internet packets. Whenever you talk to a machine (like a Web site) that doesn't support encryption, your traffic goes out "in the clear" as usual. Whenever you connect to a machine that does support this kind of encryption, this box automatically encrypts all your packets, and decrypts the ones that come in. In effect, each packet gets put into an "envelope" on one side of the net, and removed from the envelope when it reaches its destination. This works for all kinds of Internet traffic, including Web access, Telnet, FTP, email, IRC, Usenet, etc.

The encryption boxes are standard PC's that use freely available Linux software that you can download over the Internet or install from a cheap CDROM.

This wasn't just my idea; lots of people have been working on it for years. The encryption protocols for these boxes are called IPSEC (IP Security). They have been developed by the IP Security Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force, and will be a standard part of the next major version of the Internet protocols (IPv6). For today's (IP version 4) Internet, they are an option.

The Internet Architecture Board and Internet Engineering Steering Group have taken a strong stand that the Internet should use powerful encryption to provide security and privacy. I think these protocols are the best chance to do that, because they can be deployed very easily, without changing your hardware or software or retraining your users. They offer the best security we know how to build, using the Triple-DES, RSA, and Diffie-Hellman algorithms.

This "opportunistic encryption box" offers the "fax effect". As each person installs one for their own use, it becomes more valuable for their neighbors to install one too, because there's one more person to use it with. The software automatically notices each newly installed box, and doesn't require a network administrator to reconfigure it. Instead of "virtual private networks" we have a "REAL private network"; we add privacy to the real network instead of layering a manually-maintained virtual network on top of an insecure Internet.

Deployment of IPSEC

Organizations that want to secure their network will be able to put two Ethernet cards into an IBM PC, install Linux on it from a $30 CDROM or by downloading it over the net, and plug it in between their Ethernet and their Internet link or firewall. That's all they'll have to do to encrypt their Internet traffic everywhere outside their own local area network.

Travelers will be able to run Linux on their laptops, to secure their connection back to their home network (and to everywhere else that they connect to, such as customer sites). Anyone who runs Linux on a standalone PC will also be able to secure their network connections, without changing their application software or how they operate their computer from day to day.

There will also be numerous commercially available firewalls that use this technology. RSA Data Security is coordinating the S/Wan (Secure Wide Area Network) project among more than a dozen vendors who use these protocols. There's a compatability chart that shows which vendors have tested their boxes against which other vendors to guarantee interoperatility.

Eventually it will also move into the operating systems and networking protocol stacks of major vendors. This will probably take longer, because those vendors will have to figure out what they want to do about the export controls.

Current status

Protocols

The low-level encrypted packet formats are defined. The system for publishing keys and providing secure domain name service is defined. The IP Security working group has settled on an NSA-sponsored protocol for key agreement (called ISAKMP/Oakley), but it is still being worked on, as the protocol and its documentation is too complex and incomplete. There are prototype implementations of ISAKMP. The protocol is not yet defined to enable opportunistic encryption or the use of DNSSEC keys.

Linux Implementation

The Linux implementation has reached its first major release and is ready for production use in manually-configured networks, using Linux kernel version 2.0.36.

Domain Name System Security

There is now a release of BIND 8.2 that includes most DNS Security features.

The first prototype implementation of Domain Name System Security was funded by DARPA as part of their Information Survivability program. Trusted Information Systems wrote a modified version of BIND, the widely-used Berkeley implementation of the Domain Name System.

TIS, ISC, and I merged the prototype into the standard version of BIND. The first production version that supports KEY and SIG records is bind-4.9.5. This or any later version of BIND will do for publishing keys. It is available from the Internet Software Consortium. This version of BIND is not export-controlled since it does not contain any cryptography. Later releases starting with BIND 8.2 include cryptography for authenticating DNS records, which is also exportable. Better documentation is needed.

Why?

What You Can Do

Install the latest BIND at your site.

You won't be able to publish any keys for your domain, until you have upgraded your copy of BIND. The thing you really need from it is the new version of named, the Name Daemon, which knows about the new KEY and SIG record types. So, download it from the Internet Software Consortium and install it on your name server machine (or get your system administrator, or Internet Service Provider, to install it). Both your primary DNS site and all of your secondary DNS sites will need the new release before you will be able to publish your keys. You can tell which sites this is by running the Unix command "dig MYDOMAIN ns" and seeing which sites are mentioned in your NS (name server) records.

Set up a Linux system and run a 2.0.x kernel on it

Get a machine running Linux (say the 5.2 release from Red Hat). Give the machine two Ethernet cards.

Install the Linux IPSEC (Freeswan) software

If you're an experienced sysadmin or Linux hacker, install the freeswan-1.0 release, or any later release or snapshot. These releases do NOT provide automated "opportunistic" operation; they must be manually configured for each site you wish to encrypt with.

Get on the linux-ipsec mailing list

The discussion forum for people working on the project, and testing the code and documentation, is: linux-ipsec@clinet.fi. To join this mailing list, send email to linux-ipsec-REQUEST@clinet.fi containing a line of text that says "subscribe linux-ipsec". (You can later get off the mailing list the same way -- just send "unsubscribe linux-ipsec").

Check back at this web page every once in a while

I update this page periodically, and there may be new information in it that you haven't seen. My intent is to send email to the mailing list when I update the page in any significant way, so subscribing to the list is an alternative.

Related projects

IPSEC for NetBSD

This prototype implementation of the IP Security protocols is for another free operating system. Download BSDipsec.tar.gz.

IPSEC for OpenBSD

This prototype implementation of the IP Security protocols is for yet another free operating system. It is directly integrated into the OS release, since the OS is maintained in Canada, which has freedom of speech in software.