News

SSH IPSEC Toolkit Offers Large Configuration Support, Hardware Assisted Key Management, Online Certificate Enrollment, Network Management, and Formal Linux Support

SSH Communications Security (SSH), the world-leading developer of Internet security and advanced cryptography solutions, today extended its toolkit family of products with SSH IPSEC Express 3.0. SSH's security toolkits implement the IPsec (Internet Protocol Security) functionality for IP network products that need strong, cryptographic security. The new SSH IPSEC Express 3.0 incorporates the added benefits of large configuration support, hardware assisted key management, online certificate enrollment, improved network management and statistics harvesting, and formal Linux support.

"SSH IPSEC Express 3.0 marks a major new milestone in the SSH toolkit family," said Tatu Ylönen, chairman of SSH Ltd. "SSH is committed to providing its customers with state-of-the-art IP networking security. With the added functionality, support and performance of 3.0, SSH is once again delivering the industry's best IPsec implementation for advanced IP network security deployment."

About IPsec and SSH IPSEC Express

IPsec is an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standard for protecting IP traffic using cryptography on the packet level. This Internet protocol is the predominant security technology used in VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). A driving force for IPsec, VPNs allow users to establish secure data communications between multiple networks or network devices using insecure public networks such as the Internet. SSH's IPsec technology adds scalable, strong security to IP networks, without limiting its flexibility to enable new types of business opportunities, such as secure local and global communications between companies e-commerce and e-banking. SSH IPSEC Express is the world's leading toolkit for IPsec.

"SSH has taken the reins to provide our customers with the most powerful and robust IPsec technology on the market," said George Adams, president and CEO of SSH, Inc. "The introduction of SSH IPSEC Express 3.0 underscores SSH's commitment to innovation and advancing the direction of Internet security technology."

SSH IPSEC Express 3.0 delivers five major new features, including scalability to 20,000 SAs (Security Associations), new hardware APIs (Application Programming Interface) for faster key operations, support for the new online certificate enrollment protocol standards, new APIs for improved network management and statistics harvesting, and full support for Linux.

Scales to 20,000 IPsec SAs

SSH IPSEC Express 3.0 features competitive new technologies bundled into one product. SSH users will have the added benefit of scaling to larger systems with large configuration support. This feature will allow scales to 20,000 IPsec SAs for enterprise-class intranets and extranets for business-to-business e-commerce and enterprise resource planning. The technology will also bring IPsec to large multi-site enterprise networks and multi-company VPNs. This scalability allows the same technology base to support the smallest to the largest system requirements.

Enables Faster Key Processing

The toolkit also features hardware assisted key management, which speeds key exchange negotiations for faster authentication processing. SSH IPSEC Express processes thousands of such negotiations per minute in software. Now, with asynchronous public key operations added to ease the use of advanced acceleration chips, SSH licensees can also attain digital signature and key exchange protocol processing speeds limited only by acceleration chip performance.

Online Certificate Enrollment

New users will be able to implement the PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) with ease utilizing SSH IPSEC Express 3.0's added benefit of online certificate enrollment. This feature includes support for the IETF PKIX protocols (RFC 2459) to ease installation of routers and Internet appliances. Easier Policy Management and Statistics Harvesting.

SSH IPSEC Express 3.0 adds a new policy management API and a new SNMP- (Simple Network Management Protocol) ready statistics API. These new APIs ease implementation of policy management back-ends. They enable platforms to deliver state of the art network management capabilities with the added safety of IPsec security.

Full Linux Support

A key attraction to the new toolkit is its Linux support, including Red Hat v6.0 and SuSE v6.2. This compatibility brings fully integrated, tested and supported commercial quality IPsec security to Linux. It will include a full Linux packet interceptor that directly intercepts IP packet flow to speed authentication, encryption and SA processing.

SSH IPSEC Express 3.0 will ship to licensees under active maintenance agreements in December 1999.

© 2002 SSH Communications Security Corp. All rights reserved. ssh® is a registered trademark of SSH Communications Security Corp in the United States and in certain other jurisdictions. All other names and marks are property of their respective owners.