ZyXEL Communications 2602HWL-D3A manual What is Pre-Shared Key?, What is Phase 1 ID for?

Prestige 2602HWL-D3A Support Notes

What is Pre-Shared Key?

A pre-shared key identifies a communicating party during a phase 1 IKE negotiation. It is called 'Pre-shared' because you have to share it with another party before you can communicate with them over a secure connection.

What are the differences between IKE and manual key VPN?

The only difference between IKE and manual key is how the encryption keys and SPIs are determined.

∙For IKE VPN, the key and SPIs are negotiated from one VPN gateway to the other. Afterward, two VPN gateways use this negotiated keys and SPIs to send packets between two networks.

∙For manual key VPN, the encryption key, authentication key (if needed), and SPIs are predetermined by the administrator when configuring the security association.

IKE is more secure than manual key, because IKE negotiation can generate new keys and SPIs randomly for the VPN connection.

What is Phase 1 ID for?

In IKE phase 1 negotiation, IP address of remote peer is treated as an indicator to decide which VPN rule must be used to serve the incoming request. However, in some application, remote VPN box or client software is using an IP address dynamically assigned from ISP, so Prestige needs additional information to make the decision. Such additional information is what we call phase 1 ID. In the IKE payload, there are local and peer ID field to achieve this.

What are Local ID and Peer ID?

Local ID and Peer ID are used in IKE phase 1 negotiation. It’s in FQDN(Fully Qualified Domain Name) format, IKE standard takes it as one type of Phase 1 ID.

Phase 1 ID is an identification for each VPN peer. The type of Phase 1 ID may be IP/FQDN(DNS)/Ueser FQDN(E-mail). The content of Phase 1 ID depends on the Phase 1 ID type. The following is an example for how to configure phase 1 ID.

ID type Content

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IP 202.132.154.1 DNS www.zyxel.com

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