IPsec

Terms

DARPA — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, USA.

In the 1970s DARPA was tasked with solving packet encryption.

NSA – National Security Agency, USA.

In 1986 NSA sponsored security protocols under the Secure Data Network Systems (SDNS) program.

NRL — Naval Research Laboratory, USA.

In 1992, NRL was funded by DARPA to implement IPv6 and research packet encryption in BSD 4.4.

DARPA makes its packet encryption implementation available under a MIT license, the NRL starts work to push it into an IETF standard.

The NRLs version is also released as MIT and becomes the basis for most commercial implementations, RFCs 1825, 1826, and 1827.

Unlike SSH, or TLS which work at upper layers, IPSec can secure the packets themselves.