Friday, May 29, 2009

New IPsec goodies in S10u7

Hello again. Pardon any latency. This whole Oracle thing has been a bit distracting. Never mind figuring out the hard way what limitations there are on racoon2 and what to do about them.

Anyway, Solaris 10 Update 7 (aka. 5/09) is now out. It contains a few new IPsec features that have been in OpenSolaris for a bit. They include:

  • HMAC-SHA-2 support per RFC 4868 in all three sizes (SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512) for IPsec and IKE.

  • 2048-bit (group 14), 3072-bit (group 15), and 4096-bit (group 16) Diffie-Hellman groups for IKE. (NOTE: Be careful running 3072 or 4096 bit on Niagara 1 hardware, see here for why. Niagara 2 works better, but not optimally, with those two groups.
  • IKE Dead Peer Detection

  • SMF Management of IPsec. Four new services split out from network/initial:

    • svc:/network/ipsec/ipsecalgs:default -- Sets up IPsec kernel algorithm mappings.

    • svc:/network/ipsec/policy:default -- Sets up the IPsec SPD (reads /etc/inet/ipsecinit.conf).

    • svc:/network/ipsec/manual-key:default -- Reads any manually-added SAs (reads /etc/inet/secret/ipseckeys).

    • svc:/network/ipsec/ike:default -- Controls the IKE daemon.



  • The UDP_NAT_T_ENDPOINT socket option from OpenSolaris, so you can develop your own NAT-Traversing IPsec key management apps without relying on in.iked.



We've even more goodies in OpenSolaris, BTW.