Long-term Memory

Together with most of the internet, we tested IPv6 on World IPv6 day last week. I won’t go into details on what IPv6 is and why it’s important. Although IPv6 has been tested intensely in isolated networks, this is the first time it was tested on such a large scale. Technically, the participants would just add AAAA-records for their websites to DNS. This small change causes a huge effect. Since most browsers are configured to prefer IPv6 AAAA-records over IPv4 A-records, this causes all IPv6-connected users to suddenly connect over IPv6 instead of IPv4.

For the most part, this major changeover happened without as much of a hitch. In fact, if I hadn’t known it was World IPv6 day, I wouldn’t have noticed anything. But I’m not a normal web-user, so I did notice some issues.

Continue reading ‘World IPv6 day – lessons learned’ »

To get secure access to internal networks, one usually employs one of the many variants of a VPN. When connecting from a normal computer, you can install basically whatever variant you wish. When using devices such as smartphones however, the number of supported VPN technologies is usually limited. Especially on non-open platforms such as the iDevices by Apple, you can not add VPN software yourself, contrary to the Android platform.

In this post, I’ll explain how to set up an IPsec (without L2TP) tunnel endpoint on an Ubuntu server, capable of handling an iPhone/iPad/iPod/iWhatever. The users will be authenticated against an LDAP directory.

Continue reading ‘iPhone compatible IPsec VPN on an Ubuntu server, with LDAP authentication’ »

It is perfectly possible to configure a linux server (or workstation if you wish) to talk IPsec. The Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control site has a page describing it. Since IPsec is a standard protocol, I wanted to get a tunnel up and running between a linux host and a Cisco router: with success! Here are the config files that I used in this test:

Continue reading ‘IPsec under Linux’ »

IPsec is becomming the Internet standard for securing IP packets. Instead of manually configuring all the encryption parameters, the keys are usually negatiated between the peers using an ISAKMP (Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol)/Oakley protocol: IKE (Internet Key Exchange). This post goes into its details.

Continue reading ‘IPsec/ISAKMP negotiation opened up’ »

Recently I had to configure a router serving as an IPsec-GRE endpoint. So far, nothing special. The interesting part is that the terminating router is behind a NAT-device which changes the outer IP-header of the IPsec tunnel. Of course, the GRE-header is NOT affected by the NAT (since it is encrypted).

To summarize, the device needs to:

• terminate an IPsec tunnel between 172.16.2.2 <-> 10.0.0.4 (its own IP); but authenticate as 172.16.2.4
• terminate a GRE tunnel between 172.16.1.1 <-> 172.16.2.4 (a public IP that is NATed towards it)

The diagram is shown below:

172.16.x.x addresses are “public”; 10.x.x.x are private.

Continue reading ‘Terminating an IPsec-GRE tunnel behind NAT’ »