Internet Key Exchange

Table 1. Internet Key Exchange product support

Feature

Product

Release introduced

Internet Key Exchange (IKE) v2

5320 Series

Fabric Engine 8.6

5420 Series

VOSS 8.4

5520 Series

VOSS 8.2.5

5720 Series

Fabric Engine 8.7

Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocol creates a Security Association (SA) in IPsec. The SA is the relationship between two network devices that define attributes such as authentication mechanism, encryption and hash algorithms, exchange mode, and key length for secured communications. The SA should be agreed by both devices.

The IKE protocol is based on Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol (ISAKMP) which helps in building a secured connection between two or more hosts using the following concepts:

IKE uses a key exchange mechanism based on the Diffie-Hellman encryption key exchange protocol. IKE provides periodic automatic key renegotiation, pre-shared and public key infrastructures, and anti-replay defense. It is layered on top of the UDP protocol and uses UDP port 500 to exchange information between peers.

IKE Phases

A switch negotiates with a peer using IKE in two phases.

IKE Modes

There are two modes of exchanging messages in Phase 1:
  • Main mode

    This is a secure mode of exchanging messages. It allows protection of the confidentiality of the peers during negotiation. This mode provides more flexibility in proposals compared to aggressive mode. As the main mode requires a total of 6 messages to be exchanged between peers, it is more time consuming.

  • Aggressive mode

    This mode is less secure than the main mode. It does not protect the confidentiality of the peers. However, it requires only a total of 3 messages to be exchanged for phase 1, which makes this mode faster than the main mode. The number of total message exchange is reduced in this mode because some messages are embedded in other messages.

The mode of message exchange in phase 2 is called quick mode. In this mode a total of 3 messages are exchanged between the peers. This mode is used to establish IPsec SA. The negotiations in the quick mode are protected during the phase 1 negotiations in main mode.

IKE Policies

A combination of security parameters used during the IKE SA negotiation is called a policy. The policies must be configured on both the peers and at least one of the policies should match on both ends to have a successful negotiation for. If a policy is not configured on both peers or if a policy does not match on both ends, an SA cannot be setup and data cannot be exchanged.

The following are the attributes of an IKE policy:

IKE Authentication

The security gateway of a peer must authenticate the security gateway of the peer it intends to communicate with. This ensures that IKE SAs are established between the peers. The switch supports the following two authentication methods:

Signature Authentication

The switch receives the digital signature of its peer in a message exchange. The switch verifies the digital signature by using the public key of the peer. The certificate of the peer, received during the IKE negotiation, contains the public key. To ensure that the peer certificate is valid, the switch verifies its digital signature by using the certificate authority (CA) public key contained in the root CA certificate. The switch and its IKE peer require at least one common trusted root CA for authentication to work.

When IKE is configured to use digital certificates for authentication, the certificates are retrieved from the trusted certificate store in the switch, based on the provided distinguished name. The certificates received from the peer are verified with the public key.