Create and manage highly-secure Ipsec VPNs with IKEv2 and Cisco FlexVPN
The IKEv2 protocol significantly improves VPN security, and Cisco’s FlexVPN offers a unified paradigm and command line interface for taking full advantage of it. Simple and modular, FlexVPN relies extensively on tunnel interfaces while maximizing compatibility with legacy VPNs. Now, two Cisco network security experts offer a complete, easy-tounderstand, and practical introduction to IKEv2, modern IPsec VPNs, and FlexVPN.
The authors explain each key concept, and then guide you through all facets of FlexVPN planning, deployment, migration, configuration, administration, troubleshooting, and optimization. You’ll discover how IKEv2 improves on IKEv1, master key IKEv2 features, and learn how to apply them with Cisco FlexVPN.
IKEv2 IPsec Virtual Private Networks offers practical design examples for many common scenarios, addressing IPv4 and IPv6, servers, clients, NAT, pre-shared keys, resiliency, overhead, and more. If you’re a network engineer, architect, security specialist, or VPN administrator, you’ll find all the knowledge you need to protect your organization with IKEv2 and FlexVPN.
- Understand IKEv2 improvements: anti-DDoS cookies, configuration payloads, acknowledged responses, and more
- Implement modern secure VPNs with Cisco IOS and IOS-XE
- Plan and deploy IKEv2 in diverse real-world environments
- Configure IKEv2 proposals, policies, profiles, keyrings, and authorization
- Use advanced IKEv2 features, including SGT transportation and IKEv2 fragmentation
- Understand FlexVPN, its tunnel interface types, and IOS AAA infrastructure
- Implement FlexVPN Server with EAP authentication, pre-shared keys, and digital signatures
- Deploy, configure, and customize FlexVPN clients
- Configure, manage, and troubleshoot the FlexVPN Load Balancer
- Improve FlexVPN resiliency with dynamic tunnel source, backup peers, and backup tunnels
- Monitor IPsec VPNs with AAA, SNMP, and Syslog
- Troubleshoot connectivity, tunnel creation, authentication, authorization, data encapsulation, data encryption, and overlay routing
- Calculate IPsec overhead and fragmentation
- Plan your IKEv2 migration: hardware, VPN technologies, routing, restrictions, capacity, PKI, authentication, availability, and more
IKEv2 IPsec Virtual Private Networks is the first plain English introduction to IKEv2: both a complete primer on this important new security protocol, and a practical guide to deploying it with Cisco's FlexVPN implementation.
Cisco experts Graham Bartlett and Amjad Inamdar explain how IKEv2 can be used to perform mutual authentication, and to establish and maintaining security associations (SAs). Their insights into IKEv2's goals, theory, and underlying concepts will be invaluable to all network security professionals, whatever technologies or solutions they choose for implementation.
Next, Bartlett and Inamdar thoroughly introduce FlexVPN, Cisco's high-value implementation of the IKEv2 standard. You'll discover FlexVPN's unified paradigm, and learn how its command-line interface can be used to manage IKEv2 in site-to-site, remote access, hub and spoke topology, and partial mesh (spoke to spoke direct) environments.
The authors explain how FlexVPN's simple, modular framework relies on the tunnel interface paradigm while remaining compatible with legacy VPN implementations. They offer detailed guidance on configuring IKEv2 VPNs using FlexVPN in both Cisco IOS and IOS-XE environments, and show how FlexVPN unifies previous Cisco overlay solutions, including crypto maps, EasyVPN, DMVPN, and remote access. Their practical design examples and hands-on troubleshooting steps will help you gain real mastery of FlexVPN configuration and operations in any network environment.
