The Information Security Group at Royal Holloway is one of the world's largest academic research groups in information security, with about 15 permanent academic staff, 50 PhD students and a thriving masters programme. They carry out research in many areas of the subject, including network security. That is one of Kenny Paterson's areas of specialism, and he teaches their masters course on the topic, and carries out research in the area.

Your research lead you to the discovery of a high-profile vulnerability. Give us some details.

In late 2004, Arnold Yau (a PhD student in the group) and I began an investigation into IPsec security, in particular the security of the "encryption only" configuration of IPsec. The relevant standards are pretty clear that this configuration should be avoided, but they also mandate it be supported, mostly for reasons of backwards compatibility.

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