IPsec

In December 1993, the Software IP Encryption protocol swIPe (protocol) was researched at Columbia University and AT&T Bell Labs by John Ioannidis and others.

Based on the funding from Clinton administration in hosting whitehouse.gov email (from June 1st of 1993 to January 20 of 1995) at Trusted Information Systems, Wei Xu started in July 1994 the research on IP Security, enhanced the IP protocols, developed the IPSec product on the BSDI platform, and quickly extended it on to Sun OS, HP UX, and other UNIX systems. Upon the success, Wei was facing another challenge by the slow performance of computing DES and Triple DES. The assembly software encryption was unable to support even a T1 speed under the Intel 80386 architecture. By exploring the Crypto cards from Germany, Wei further developed an automated device driver, known as plug-and-play today, in integrating with the hardware Crypto. After achieving the throughput much higher than a T1s, Wei Xu finally made the commercial product practically feasible, that was released as a part of the well-known Gauntlet firewall. In December 1994, it was deployed for the first time in production for securing some remote sites between east and west coastal states of the United States.

Another IP Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP)[2] was researched at the Naval Research Laboratory as part of a DARPA-sponsored research project, with openly published by IETF SIPP[3] Working Group drafted in December 1993 as a security extension for SIPP. This ESP was originally derived from the US Department of Defense SP3D protocol, rather than being derived from the ISO Network-Layer Security Protocol (NLSP). The SP3D protocol specification was published by NIST, but designed by the Secure Data Network System project of the US Department of Defense. The Security Authentication Header (AH) is derived partially from previous IETF standards work for authentication of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) version 2.

In 1995, The IPsec working group in the IETF was started to create an open freely available and vetted version of protocols that had been developed under NSA contract in the Secure Data Network System (SDNS) project. The SDNS project had defined a Security Protocol Layer 3 (SP3) that had been published by NIST and was also the basis of the ISO Network Layer Security Protocol (NLSP).[4] Key management for SP3 was provided by the Key Management Protocol (KMP) that provided a baseline of ideas for subsequent work in the IPsec committee.

IPsec is officially standardised by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in a series of Request for Comments documents addressing various components and extensions. It specifies the spelling of the protocol name to be IPsec