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Remove private-use values from IKEv2



Private-use values for payloads, attributes, and so on lead to lack of interoperability and are not needed. The only time private-use numbers should be used is for limited testing experimental changes to IKE, but such testing can just as easily be done using vendor-id payloads. For example, a message with a particular vendor ID payload could mean "ignore the encryption algorithm specified in the SA payload and use WhizzyAlg-128 instead."

The IETF has a long history of problems with private-use anything. Because implementations often get out of the laboratory, there are often value clashes. Worse yet, there often demands that, because so many people are using private value xyz to mean the abc feature, we should not give abc a regular value when it becomes an RFC, we should keep using xyz (or at least say in the RFC that xyz is equivalent to the new number).

Real testing of new algorithms (as compared to the more common "early implementation") is rare, and when it happens, it is quite easy to control with vendor ID payloads.

Note that, if private-use payload types are forbidden, there is no longer any use for the critical bit. In that case, the critical bit should be removed from IKEv2 in order to make the protocol simpler.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium