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

IPsec: A Suite of Protocols


There is not a single IPsec protocol. IPsec is in fact a collection of standards (and drafts, because the IETF process is very slow) that all deal with using cryptography to ensure authenticity and in almost all cases to also guarantee confidentiality of the content of the IP packets. Most of the standards documents contain details of the cryptographic ciphers and algorithms used. The intent of this chapter is to cover what you need to know from a practical point of view, without going into all the details and design decisions.

The IPsec protocols can be split into two main categories: packet handling and trust relationship management. Packet handling is usually done by the operating system kernel itself, since it requires speed, efficiency, and low latency that are easier to offer at the low-level processing of the kernel.

The trust relationship management is not as time sensitive, since it only happens at the start and at the refresh intervals of an IPsec connection...