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StrongSwan Primer
What is StrongSwan
- Their Summary: StrongSwan is a comprehensive implementation of the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocols that allows securing IP traffic in policy- and route-based IPsec scenarios from simple to very complex.
Our Implementation
- From the statement above we see that StrongSwan implements the following:
- IKE protocols
- Policy or route based IPsec
- The implementation of these can vary from simple to very complex.
- In RADIUSdesk our philosophy always been to keep things as simple as possible because Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
- Our implementation uses certificates (PKI) and Route based IPsec (xfrm interfaces) similar to the other VPN implementations like Wireguard and OpenVPN.
IKE
- Internet Key Exchange (IKE, versioned as IKEv1 and IKEv2) is the protocol used to set up a security association (SA) in the IPsec protocol suite.
- IKE has come a long way and evolved over time.
- Initially things like NAT traversal and a client whose public address changes were not supported.
- With IKEv2 these shortcomings were addressed making the StrongSwan implementation just as versatile as other modern VPN solutions.