The industry standard for establishing VPN's, IPSec comprises a group of protocols and algorithms to provide authentication and encryption of data across IP-based networks. There are three main components to IPSec: Key Management IPSec uses the internet key exchange (IKE) to securely establish and pass shared keys between sites. Keys and security associations may also be passed manually. Authentication Header (HA) protocol defines methods of establishing the identity of the message originator and ensuring that the transmitted data has not been tampered with. Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) protocol provides the same functions as the Authentication header protocol but additionally defines encryption methods for the data. All three components are modular and designed to incorporate new algorithms and schemas, ensuring forward compatibility as new advancements in encryption or key exchange mechanisms are made. However, IPSec defines lowest level denominators to enable at least minimal interoperability between different vendors’ implementations of an IPSec VPN. For instance, all IPSec VPN's must include the DES encryption algorithm for data encryption.

• R&D managers and software engineers willing to integrate IPSec in their solutions.
• IT security staff who wish to understand IPSec in more depth.
• Other personnel (Support, QA, Marketing etc.) dealing with IPSec based systems.

• Knowledge in TCP/IP, Applied cryptography