Charlie Kaufman
More info
- Known for
- Network Security (1995), IKEv2
- Spec
- RFC 4306
The security architect who wrote the textbook every network engineer read, then cleaned up IPsec's key exchange.
Kaufman was a security architect at Digital Equipment Corporation, then at Lotus/IBM for Notes, and later at Microsoft. In 1995 he published Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World with Radia Perlman and Mike Speciner. It explained Kerberos, PKI and protocol design with unusual wit and unusually little reverence for standards committees.
He edited RFC 4306 (2005), IKEv2, which replaced the original key exchange for IPsec. IKEv1 was spread across three documents with eight variants of its first phase; IKEv2 put everything in one and removed most of the options. Having fewer ways to get it wrong is an underrated security feature.