Rob Hudson wrote:

> Would a common use for this be something like... 1 business having 3
> branch offices, and them wanting a VPN between the 3, with secure
> encrypted transmissions along the untrusted internet?  Something like
> that?

Yes, that's one common scenario.  The other is, imagine plugging
your laptop in anywhere and having a secure channel back to the
home office(s).

> What kind of performance loss is there with encrypting at the gateway?
> Does IPSEC just encrypt the data segment in the TCP/IP headers or
> something more?  Where's a FAQ?  I wanna know how it works.  :)

Adds probably 20-30 bytes to each packet.  For a 1K packet, that's
2-3% overhead.  For anything slower than a T3, the computation time to
do the encryption/decryption should be negligible compared to that
2-3% traffic increase.

There's a fairly good description of the IPSEC protocols at the
FreeS/WAN site.

   http://www.freeswan.org/freeswan_trees/freeswan-1.91/doc/ipsec.html

-- 
Bob Miller                              K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com                     [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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