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This encompasses both authentication, making sure the entity communicating - be it person, application or device - is what it claims to be, and access control, mapping an identity to allowable actions and enforcing those limitations. Authentication and access controlĪccepted security best practice is to only allow access that is expressly permitted, denying everything else. clientless pros and cons and fitting VPN gateways into your network and your app servers.
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Let's compare how IPsec and SSL/TLS VPNs address authentication and access control, defense against attack and client security, and then look at what it takes to configure and administer both IPsec and SSL/TLS VPNs, including client vs. SSL/TLS VPNs can only support browser-based applications, absent custom development to support other kinds.īefore you choose to deploy either or both, you'll want to know how SSL/TLS and IPsec VPNs stack up in terms of security and what price you have to pay for that security in administrative overhead.
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To an application, an IPsec VPN looks just like any other IP network. IPsec VPNs can support all IP-based applications. In other words, IPsec VPNs connect hosts or networks to a protected private network, while SSL/TLS VPNs securely connect a user's application session to services inside a protected network. SSL/TLS VPN products protect application traffic streams from remote users to an SSL/TLS gateway. IPsec VPNs protect IP packets exchanged between remote networks or hosts and an IPsec gateway located at the edge of your private network.
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These differences directly affect both application and security services and should drive deployment decisions. Both IPsec and SSL/ TLS VPNs can provide enterprise-level secure remote access, but they do so in fundamentally different ways.
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