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

DNS Key Records


Back in 1996, there was no DNSSEC, which meant no specific DNS records for public keys were available. So the only record type that could be used to store the public key was the TXT record. When the first part of the DNSSEC specification was finished and implemented, it resulted in a new record, the KEY record. Although this record was originally meant for both DNSSEC and third-party applications that needed to publish public keys, and these KEY records could be subtyped, mixing DNSSEC and third-party key records came to be viewed as bad practice. RFC 3445 specified that the KEY record should only be used by DNSSEC, and other protocols should specify their own new records.

For IPsec, the IPSECKEY record was introduced. During all this time, the only reliable DNS record to use for OE had been the TXT record. Many DNS implementations never implemented the KEY record, and the IPSECKEY record is so new it hasn't yet even been implemented in the reference implementation of the...