On Wednesday, March 13, 2002, at 06:49 , William Allen Simpson wrote: > 10 years ago on Tuesday, Phil Karn sprawled out across my hotel > room bed and drew the packet header that became ESP. Actually, that packet header wasn't directly related to ESP, though there aren't but so many ways a security encapsulation can be framed. The SP3 spec, published by NIST more than 10 years ago, was the direct predecessor to ESP. This was noted in RFC-1827, I believe. Credit is due to the (mostly DoD sponsored) group that came up with SP3 long ago. I didn't happen to be at that ad-hoc meeting in San Diego, so I wasn't influenced by it -- and I'm the one who wrote the ESP spec in the early 90s, initially inside the IPng WG as an individual contribution. I decline to comment on the other portions of your posting. Ran rja@extremenetworks.com