IPsec helps us satisfy our needs for a data security
when traversing different networks.
It helps us mitigate against certain attacks and provides us
some critical security mechanisms that really help with the
defense-in-depth in CIA triad.
Let's talk about some of the reasons why we implement IPsec really quickly.
The first topic that we're going to talk about is attacks.
IPsec helps us prevent various attacks like data corruption,
theft, and replay attacks, along with many other network-based ones.
It does this through the suite of protocols and
algorithms that we previously discussed.
For example,
IPsec uses increasing sequence numbers for each
encrypted packet to prevent replay attacks.
It allows the receiving device to only allow sequence numbers that
it's expecting so replay attacks are prevented.
It also helps us prevent eavesdropping, which we'll get into next.
The CIA triad has been around for a while now,
and IPsec helps us with at least two out of the three of these.
By creating a secure tunnel,
it helps us with our data's confidentiality because the
payload within the IPsec packet is encrypted.
Outsiders would have to break the encryption to be able to
make sense of the data that's inside.
From the integrity perspective,
we know that whoever sent the data is indeed themselves,
as IPsec helps us prevent man-in-the-middle attacks as well.
This gives us the ability to verify that the data did in fact
come from the network device that we think sent it since it has
the right algorithms and keys needed to properly encrypt the
payload for us to decrypt it.
We're essentially authenticating the data origin so that we can verify that it's being sent from who or what we want it sent from.