Hello, and welcome to the course, Protocol Deep Dive: IPsec.
I am Joe, and I want to say thanks for learning with me today.
We'll be talking all about IPsec in this course and
digging into not only the theory,
but the configuration and analysis of the protocol.
IPsec is very common in our environments today.
It's a very useful protocol that does an excellent job securing VPNs.
It has many users,
and we'll learn how we can fit these into our environments to
help posture our defense-in-depth strategy.
This is a great protocol, and I'm excited to dig into it with you.
Within this course, we'll be focusing on my lab network.
Using this topology,
we'll be able to focus on the building blocks of the IPsec protocol
suite and really see the functionality of it.
We're going to break it down to a low level,
then build it back up to show how we can manipulate and
utilize the suite to protect our data.
I love IPsec and its many functions and uses.
It's an awesome protocol suite.
We'll be using this in our demos throughout the course to show how
deep we can go with it and demonstrate some of the use cases on
Cisco routers through various implementations such as DMVPN and
Dynamic Virtual Tunnel Interfaces.
We'll also discuss the many other uses of it to solidify
its capabilities and functionality.
Our robotics company, Globomantics,
is looking to change around the infrastructure again.
The management is concerned that the cloud sharing apps aren't enough
between the headquarters and remote site and need to find a way to get the
remote site users access to the corporate resources.
IPsec is considered one of the standards in securing VPN traffic,
so it's currently the frontrunner for this.
When originally planning for this site,
the original plans were to have the remote site just
have a typical internet connection,
and all necessary sharing is via apps and cloud tools.
As the site came to reality,
it was realized that this wasn't sufficient enough
and that a redesign is needed.
Corporate access is now a must for remote site users.
In this course, we're going to use a sample topology,
like shown here, so we can learn all about the protocol and how it works.
Of course, this is just a basic representation of the WAN links for the network.
We're going to say this router is the headquarters,
and this one is the remote office.
In between is the internet.
Ideally,
we don't want the host on the internet to see any of
our traffic between the two offices.
Now,
there are mitigation techniques that the internet service
providers put on their networks to help us mitigate this type
of visibility and segment the traffic, but there are two concerns with that.
First,
some sort of service-level agreement would need to be in place to ensure this.
This would work if we had a point-to-point connection between the two sites,
which brings me to my next point.
We typically wouldn't,
and that somewhere in the path the traffic would be somewhat visible.
This is where it's up to organizations to ensure that they are doing
everything they can to protect themselves as well.
In our case,
we'll be creating a VPN connection between the two
so that the traffic is secure.
There are other mitigation techniques that ISPs provide,
such as MPLS links and other sorts of Layer 2 VPNs that we can use, but for the purposes of this course, we're going to be focusing on IPsec VPNs.