[strongSwan] Please help - Using strongSwan to connect to CheckPoint VPN-1

[Andreas Steffen]

Hi,

as far as I know, the CheckPoint VPN gateway does not support the IKEv2
protocol. Therefore you can't use the strongSwan NetworkManager plugin
to set up a connection.

The CheckPoint VPN gateway most probably will use IKEv1 and XAUTH.
The first thing to find out is whether IKEv1 Main Mode is used
by the CheckPoint box since strongSwan does not support the
potentially insecure IKEv1 Aggressive Mode. If Main Mode is
possible then you can configure strongSwan's IKEv1 pluto daemon
via /etc/ipsec.conf.

Best regards

Andreas

Sucha Singh wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm looking to use strongSwan to connect to my company CheckPoint
> VPN, as I am new to Linux and networking I am really struggling to
> get anything working.  I have a Actividentity token that generates a
> password that authenticates against a RADIUS server, below is a list
> of facts I know from my CheckPoint config from Windows:
> 
> I have an IP address for company site Authentication - Challenge
> Response NAT-T protocol - enabled Office Mode - enabled Use NAT
> traversal tunneling - enabled IKE over TCP - enabled Force UDP
> encapsulation - enabled
> 
> I have attempted to use the Network Manager GUI to connect but it
> fails with "VPN service failed to start", the syslog file contains a
> host of errors.  The settings I attempted were:
> 
> Gateway: Address - IP address of my company site Certificate - None
> 
> Client: Authentication - EAP Username - My id I use for my token to
> generate password
> 
> Options - Request an inner IP address - unchecked Enforce UDP
> encapsulation - checked Use IP compression - unchecked
> 
> My questions would be:
> 
> 1) Does strongSwan support the protocols/authentication methods I
> describe for CheckPoint VPN 2) If yes, then does my setup through
> Network Manager look correct 3) If yes, then is it a case of posting
> the sys.log errors for someone to kindly look at
> 
> I appreciate anyone's help and time with this.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Jana

======================================================================
Andreas Steffen                         andreas.steffen at strongswan.org
strongSwan - the Linux VPN Solution!                www.strongswan.org
Institute for Internet Technologies and Applications
University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil
CH-8640 Rapperswil (Switzerland)
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