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

Frequently used VPN Client Appliances


Many DSL routers and WiFi products now support IPsec. These devices should be able to connect to Openswan. Some of them might be limited to pre-shared key connections, but more and more devices now offer support for X.509 Certificates. We will discuss a few commonly used products.

ZyXEL

ZyXEL makes products ranging from end-user DSL routers with IPsec support to dedicated firewall/VPN products.

Some versions of the ZyXEL firmware seem to exhibit a bug at rekey or IPsec SA deletion. The problem is that the ZyXEL units seem to delete the Phase 2 sixty seconds after the deletion of Phase 1, even if one of them has not yet expired. The problem is that during these sixty seconds, Openswan still uses the Phase 2, since it did not get deleted, but the ZyXEL assumes that the Phase 2 is dead. No packets will flow during these sixty seconds.

To add to the problem, the longest lifetime (on both the Phase 1 and Phase 2, since they are treated the same) is 3600 seconds...