Cisco Two Armed VPN Concentrator and Default Route

Take the following scenario: You have a hub site. Branch (spoke) sites connect to the hub with a L2L IPsec tunnel. All traffic must traverse the tunnel (no local breakout to the Internet). At the hub, your VPN concentrator is separate from your firewall and runs in two armed mode. Where one interface is outside the firewall (public) to terminate the incoming tunnels and another interface is within a DMZ. As such

Cisco Crypto ACLs – Do They Really Need to Match?

When starting out with IPsec tunnels it seems to be a common misconception that the crypto ACL, sometimes referred to as the encryption domain or the interesting traffic, must match 100% or be mirrored at both peers or the tunnel won’t come up. This isn’t strictly true. Whilst the ISAKMP phase 1 and IPsec phase 2 proposals must match, the crypto ACL can be different. Assume that at the local

Auditing Cisco ASA Firewall Rules

Today I was auditing a firewall rule set on a Cisco ASA firewall. The firewall has around 399 ACLs (Access Control Lists) comprising of 7272 ACEs (Access Control Entries). Quite a task! Unfortunately I didn’t have any tools to hand such as Cisco Security Manager or something like FirePac to audit the rules and give me some suggestions. Stage 1 was to visually look at the ACLs and spot the obvious