[ISN] IBM, VPN vendor seek to extend IPSec standard

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http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?99025.wnipsec.htm
IBM, VPN vendor seek to extend IPSec standard
By Stephen Lawson
InfoWorld Electric

  IBM and virtual private network vendor Ashley Laurent announced this
week they plan to propose extending the IP Security (IPSec) protocol. 

  The proposed extension would integrate Network Address Translation (NAT) 
with IPSec, and would allow remote employees and trusted corporate
partners to use a set of private IP addresses when communicating with an
organization's headquarters, officials said. 

  Ashley Laurent's VPCom Server can assign trusted users a virtual IP
address from a block of private addresses. Using these addresses, users
can directly access other remote users and Windows NT server resources as
if they are on the LAN, according to Ashley Laurent. In addition, NAT
allows routers to recognize these users and direct their traffic to the
VPCom server, reducing demands on a general-purpose firewall. 

  IBM is preparing a request for comment to present to the IPSec group of
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). 

  Jeffrey Goodwin, president of Ashley Laurent, said the IPSec proposal
will probably be submitted in the next few weeks and could be adopted as
early as an IETF meeting this fall. 

  "We think it has all the fundamentals to move through quickly,"  Goodwin
said. The proposal has received interest from Cisco Systems, WatchGuard
Technologies, and other vendors he added. 

  IPSec defines common ways to authenticate users and encrypt traffic,
allowing for automatic setup of secured sessions between users with
IPSec-compliant hardware and software. 

  The proposed extension is designed to make it easier to set up intranets
among a company's widely dispersed users, or extranets comprised of
trusted partner organizations. 

  Goodwin said Ashley Laurent is working with IBM to integrate its VPCom
server capabilities into the AS400, OS390, and RS6000 server architectures
to help secure commerce and other functions over IP networks. Today, IBM
recommends VPCom as a complement to IBM's eNetwork firewall. 

  Ashley Laurent Inc., in Austin, Texas, can be reached at www.vpcom.com. 
IBM Corp., in White Plains, N.Y., can be reached at www.ibm.com. 

Stephen Lawson is a senior writer at InfoWorld.  --

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