Book Image

Openswan: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

By : Ken Bantoft, Paul Wouters
Book Image

Openswan: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

By: Ken Bantoft, Paul Wouters

Overview of this book

<p>With the widespread use of wireless and the integration of VPN capabilities in most modern laptops, PDA's and mobile phones, there is a growing desire for encrypting more and more communications to prevent eavesdropping. Can you trust the coffee shop's wireless network? Is your neighbor watching your wireless? Or are your competitors perhaps engaged in industrial espionage? Do you need to send information back to your office while on the road or on board a ship? Or do you just want to securely access your MP3's at home? IPsec is the industry standard for encrypted communication, and Openswan is the de-facto implementation of IPsec for Linux.</p> <p>Whether you are just connecting your home DSL connection with your laptop when you're on the road to access your files at home, or you are building an industry size, military strength VPN infrastructure for a medium to very large organization, this book will assist you in setting up Openswan to suit those needs.</p> <p>The topics discussed range from designing, to building, to configuring Openswan as the VPN gateway to deploy IPsec using Openswan. It not only for Linux clients, but also the more commonly used Operating Systems such as Microsoft Windows and MacOSX. Furthermore it discusses common interoperability examples for third party vendors, such as Cisco, Checkpoint, Netscreen and other common IPsec vendors.</p> <p>The authors bring you first hand information, as they are the official developers of the Openswan code. They have included the latest developments and upcoming issues. With experience in answering questions on a daily basis on the mailing lists since the creation of Openswan, the authors are by far the most experienced in a wide range of successful and not so successful uses of Openswan by people worldwide.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks with Openswan
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface

Cipher Performance


A 2.8 GHz x86 class processor can saturate a 100 Mbps network link using 3DES, and sustain 300 Mbps using AES without hardware acceleration. Note that these benchmarks were performed without any additional requirements. Most notably, no firewall rules were defined. If you do need to deploy firewall rules, there are a few rules of thumbs that will help you optimize.

Try to branch often, so that you traverse through less firewall rules. Do not use a single top-down list of rules.

Use the related keyword somewhere at the top of your ruleset, so those connections that do not need to traverse the whole tree (again) are accepted.

Put those types of packets that you get most of at the top of your rulesets. Depending on the server, this could be ESP packets, UDP 4500/500 packets, HTTP packets, FTP packets, DNS packets, or even database packets.

Optimizing your firewall is outside the scope of this book, but you should realize it could impact heavily on the performance of your VPN...