Security on the horizon. [VPNs were the rage at N+I 98]
By Scott Bradner, Network World, 5/18/98
nwfusion.com
As predicted in a front-page story in the May 4th issue of Network World, virtual private networks (VPN) were all the rage at NetWorld+Interop 98 in Las Vegas. VPNs were not the only hot topic by far, but they did seem to be everywhere you looked.
The show seemed a bit subdued compared with
last year's (although any show in Las Vegas is on
an entirely different plane than shows elsewhere). The magicians trying to
entice you to listen to a spiel about Ethernet switches were here once
again, but there seemed to be fewer of them and, wonder of wonders,
there were even some technically competent people in some of the
booths.
In addition to VPNs, the Gigabit Ethernet vendors were out in force with
20 or more booths in addition to the big Gigabit Alliance booth. There
were many other interesting products, such as Manage.Com's Java-based
front-line management station.
But VPNs seemed to me to be the show focus this year, just like Gigabit Ethernet was last year, IP Switching the year before and ATM before that. I just hope Gigabit Ethernet and VPNs do not take the same path to success that the other hot topics did.
One problem with all of the attention on VPNs is there is no one
consistent thing that the VPN proponents are talking about.
Some vendors are talking about the connections between corporate
firewalls when they speak of VPNs. Others are referring to the
connections inside a WAN that an ISP might set up to do traffic
engineering or to help facilitate the delivery of consistent quality of service
(QoS). Others mean the IP tunnels that can be created between an
on-the-road employee dialing into a local ISP and the home office. And a
few vendors seem to think any en-crypted point-to-point link qualifies as
a VPN.
All of the above are valid definitions of what a VPN might be. But with all
of the differing assumptions about VPNs, it is a good idea for users
considering the purchase of VPN services or equipment to be sure that
their own and the vendors' assumptions about the technology are in line.
One thing that most definitions of the technology have in common is that a
VPN includes encrypted point-to-point tunnels. Encouragingly, most of
the vendors I saw said they supported IP Security. IPSec is the IETF
technology that supports encrypted tunnels along with management of the
cryptographic keys. IPSec is in the final stages of being approved as a
proposed standard.
In spite of the fact that IPSec is not yet approved, eight IPSec software
vendors have already demonstrated interoperability between their
products, and many more companies have announced products.
It's a good sign that most of the VPN vendors say they already support
IPSec or will in the future. This means there is a reasonable chance that
many of the VPN products will interoperate. This, of course, is the
purpose of standards.
Disclaimer: Even though Harvard sets its own standards, its
products interoperate. The above are my own observations.
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