I think doing this would cause clients to calculate the puzzle solution, when 
in fact they don’t have to, and sending back the COOKIE would be enough.

What I envision is for the IKE gateway to measure its load (probably based on 
amount of half-open IKE SAs). As long as the load level is low, the gateway 
sends neither COOKIE nor PUZZLE. If the load gets higher, the gateway begins 
sending COOKIEs, and every implementation of RFC 5996 works. If the load gets 
even higher (to the extent that it jeopardizes the gateway’s ability to provide 
its services), then it sends PUZZLEs instead of COOKIEs, and initiators that 
don’t support this specification are left out.

Yoav

On Jul 11, 2014, at 9:21 AM, Valery Smyslov <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Yoav,
> 
> did you consider the following initial exchange:
> 
>    Initiator                         Responder
>    -------------------------------------------------------------------
>    HDR(A,0), SAi1, KEi, Ni  -->
>                                 <--  HDR(A,0), N(COOKIE), N(PUZZLE)
> 
>   (supported initiator)
>    HDR(A,0), N(SOLVED_PUZZLE), SAi1,
>        KEi, Ni  -->
> 
> -- or --
> 
>   (unsupported or unwilling initiator)
>    HDR(A,0), N(COOKIE), SAi1,
>        KEi, Ni  -->
> 
> The idea is that responder sends both the COOKIE and the PUZZLE notifications 
> (of course, the cookie for PUZZLE must be generated
> differently from the cookie for COOKIE, probably using different secret
> or different algorithm).
> 
> In this case if the initiator doesn't support puzzles, it would
> ignore the PUZZLE notification as unknown status notification
> and return the COOKIE. On the other hand, if initiator supports
> puzzles, then it have a choice - whether to return COOKIE
> and have lower chance to establish SA or make some work
> and return SOLVED_PUZZLE (that is identical to COOKIE apart from the type of 
> notification) and have a better chance.
> The responder in this case would give more priority to the SOLVED_PUZZLE 
> requests and leave the remaining resources
> to the COOKIE and initial IKE_SA_INIT requests.
> 
> I think this approach would:
>   1) increase interoperability
>   2) give more flexibility to initiator depending on
>       the CPU resources it has
>   3) allows responder to separate solved puzzles        from COOKIEs and to 
> give them more priority
> 
> Regards,
> Valery Smyslov.
> 

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