Editing IPsec (section)

==Standards status==
IPsec was developed in conjunction with [[IPv6]] and was originally required to be supported by all standards-compliant implementations of [[IPv6]] before RFC 6434 made it only a recommendation.{{ref RFC|6434}} IPsec is also optional for [[IPv4]] implementations. IPsec is most commonly used to secure IPv4 traffic.{{citation needed|date=January 2019}}

IPsec protocols were originally defined in RFC 1825 through RFC 1829, which were published in 1995. In 1998, these documents were superseded by RFC 2401 and RFC 2412 with a few incompatible engineering details, although they were conceptually identical. In addition, a mutual authentication and key exchange protocol [[Internet Key Exchange]] (IKE) was defined to create and manage security associations. In December 2005, new standards were defined in RFC 4301 and RFC 4309 which are largely a superset of the previous editions with a second version of the Internet Key Exchange standard [[IKEv2]]. These third-generation documents standardized the abbreviation of IPsec to uppercase "IP" and lowercase "sec".  "ESP" generally refers to RFC 4303, which is the most recent version of the specification.

Since mid-2008, an IPsec Maintenance and Extensions (ipsecme) working group is active at the IETF.<ref>{{cite web|access-date=2015-10-26|url=https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ipsecme/charter/|title=ipsecme charter}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|access-date=2015-10-26|url=https://tools.ietf.org/wg/ipsecme/|title=ipsecme status}}</ref>