by Kaushik Das
What is IPSec?
IPSec, is a framework of open standards (from IETF) that define policies for secure communication in a network. In addition, these standards also describe how to enforce these policies.
Using IPSec, participating peers (computers or machines) can achieve data confidentiality, data integrity, and data authentication at the network layer (i.e. Layer 3 of the Open Systems Interconnection 7-layer networking model). RFC 2401 specifies the base architecture for IPsec compliant systems.
This RFC says that “the goal of the architecture is to provide various security services for traffic at the IP layer, in both the IPv4 and IPv6 environments.” See also RFC 2402, RFC 2406 and RFC 2407 for more details on IPSec.
The main purpose of IPSec is to provide interoperable, high quality, cryptographically-based security for IPv4 and IPv6. It offers various security services at the IP layer and therefore, offers protection at this (i.e. IP) and higher layers. These security services are, for example, access control, connectionless integrity, data origin authentication, protection against replays (a form of partial sequence integrity), confidentiality (encryption), and limited traffic flow confidentiality. Continue reading »
