Subject: [IPsec] Closing IPsecME work on PAKE

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2010 09:25:52 -0700

Greetings again. It does not seem like there are many people in the WG who want to work on the password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) item in our charter. During the past few threads on PAKE, the only people who spoke out were authors of proposed PAKE protocols. Even after some prodding on my part, only one other WG participant spoke up, and that person even proposed another alternative.

This work would take a fair amount of design work and review, yet few people are willing to do that particular work, and thus it seems unlikely that we could produce a high-quality PAKE extension. I have proposed to Sean Turner, our Area Director, that we instead simply drop the work from our charter, and he agreed.

Of course, the authors of the various proposals that have been discussed are probably still interested in moving their proposals forwards. Sean has agreed to consider each of them as proposals to become Experimental RFCs. If some implementers adopt one or more of the proposals that become Experimental RFCs, the IETF might later move one or  more to standards track. My personal hope is that one, and only one, PAKE for IKEv2 eventually makes it to standards track, but that is a consideration for the IETF in the future, not now.

Yaron and I will follow up with Sean about updating our charter accordingly.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium