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RE: Windows 2000 and Cicsco router interoperability



At 11:58 PM -0700 5/12/00, Jan Vilhuber wrote:
>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

If reduced security in a context that focuses on security (else why 
use IPsec at all?) is considered equivalent, then maybe we all need 
to revisit the goals of these protocols.

Steve



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