Manually configuring large firewall policies can be a hard and error-prone task. It is even
harder in the case of IPsec policies that can specify IP packets not only to be accepted or
discarded, but also to be cryptographically protected in various ways. However, in many
cases the configuration task can be simplified by writing a set of smaller, independent
policies that are then reconciled consistently. Similarly, there is often the need to reconcile
policies from multiple sources into a single one. In this paper, we discuss the issues that …

A little bit of background to explain where this is coming from. Microsoft Vista has now
shipped, as I'm sure you are all aware, and there's an improved IPsec implementation in
there, which had quite a lot of work done on overhauling it. I had the job of being one of the
people on the design review team, so one of the things I was doing over the last year or so
was trying to poke holes in IPsec. The low level view of this talk is it's about ways in which
you might look for security holes in IPsec implementations, but there'sa more general …