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RE: Windows 2000 and Cicsco router interoperability



On Fri, 12 May 2000, Stephen Kent wrote:
>   Shekhar,
> 
> >I can understand the waste of bandwidth by L2TP.
> >But, can you please elaborate more on how does L2TP interfere
> >with the access controls?
> 
> IPsec includes access controls analogous to those of a stateless, 
> packet filtering firewall.  The receiver knows the SA to which each 
> packet is cryptographically bound, thus it can match the packet 
> headers (selectors) against those that were negotiated for the SA in 
> question. If a packet arrives over a tunnel mode SA, the receiving 
> IPsec implementation checks the inner IP (and transport layer) 
> header, while in transport mode, the outer IP header (and the inner 
> transport header).  When L2TP is used with IPsec, the L2TP spec calls 
> for transport mode SAs, which means that only the outer IP header is 
> checked.  Thus the tunneled IP packet is not checked for access 
> contorl purposes by IPsec.
> 
> Once a packet leaves the IPsec environment, this binding to an SA is 
> lost (unless some non-standard mechanisms are employed to maintain 
> the binding). So the best that a separate firewall can do is to match 
> the packet against its filter list to see if it matches ANY filter 
> rule.  This is much less secure.
> 
But no less usefull.

jan
 --
Jan Vilhuber                                            vilhuber@cisco.com
Cisco Systems, San Jose                                     (408) 527-0847



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