Abstract
Internet security has gained paramount importance today due to the usage of Internet for increasingly critical data transmissions and the increasing incidences of security breaches. This need for security has given rise to a plethora of security devices like VPNs, firewalls and network intrusion detection/prevention systems. Of these products, IPsec VPN caters to the network level security between disjoint private networks connected through a public network. IKE is the protocol which automatically negotiates the cryptographic parameters for IPsec. WIKET or Wipro IPsec/IKE protocol test tool is one among a few solutions that can address the complete testing life cycle of IPsec products. Conformance test cases come bundled with the tool. New test cases can be easily written or the bundled conformance test cases modified to test new scenarios. This speeds up the testing of the protocol implementations and provides a faster time to market advantage.

The first part of the white paper provides an overview of network security threats, security services to mitigate these threats, followed by the various solutions available. The second part discusses conformance test requirements for IKE/IPsec and elaborates on the architecture of the WIKET tool for IKE/IPsec testing. WIKET runs on FreeBSD[8], and is based on the Open Source KAME/ Racoon IKE implementation on FreeBSD. Using the internally developed HITSL (High level IKE/IPsec Test-case Specification Language), test cases are given as input to the WIKET test engine. The test engine parses the HITSL test files, creates IKE messages, uses the modified Racoon IKE to send and receive messages, analyses the received messages and logs the pass/fail status for the test case appropriately. Similarly, the test engine makes use of a modified IPsec stack to test a target for IPsec conformance.

WIKET simplifies IPsec/IKE conformance test activity, and functions as a tool to be used by anybody in any phase of the IPsec testing lifecycle.

Authors Sundeep Puliccott Kalimani Venkatesan G

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