Multi-Platform IPSec Toolkit for C

The comprehensive IPSec Toolkit™ delivers a complete user-land implementation of the IPSec VPN protocols, enabling embedded system vendors and Internet infrastructure providers to accelerate their development of secure connectivity solutions.

The IPSec Toolkit is suitable to vendors that need to add standards-based security features into existing or new products, such as firewalls, access concentrators, wireless client applications, and more.

The strong benefits of using a ready-made IPSec library include dramatic reductions to the in-house development costs, rapid time-to-market, reduced software maintenance requirements, excellent interoperability with other major vendors, and last but not least in the security business, the availability of a wide range of already proven security and management features.

IPSec Toolkit - Introduction

The IPSec Toolkit™ is tailor-made to provide third-party integrators with the flexibility to design and develop their own market-leading VPN solutions. The IPSec VPN library design focuses on a number of key issues:

Complete IPSec/IKE Solution		You get a powerful quality product that integrates all the IPSec cryptography, Internet Key Exchange (IKE), authentication, interoperability and usability features required to deliver robust Virtual Private Networking.
Easy to Learn, Rapid Integration		The IPSec Toolkit™ is designed to be easy-to-understand; it ships with 6 fully working sample applications and comprehensive, clear documentation. Whether you need to integrate IPSec support into an existing product or start from scratch - we have complete sample applications to speed up your development.
Field-tested and Proven		The IPSec Toolkit™ has proven its robust, flexible and interoperable end-to-end VPN capability in thousands of installations worldwide. As a key component of the InJoy Firewall™ product, the IPSec Toolkit was selected by both Nortel Networks and Cisco Systems as their exclusive VPN software solution for their enterprise OS/2 customers.
Compliance with standards		IPSec in itself is merely a comprehensive framework of standards. Strict adherence to these standards is the key to maintaining robust, secure and compatible tunnels with third party vendors.
Full IPv6 support		The IPSec Toolkit™ supports operating on top of IPv6 networks, with full support of all protocols needed to operate a IPv6-capable IPSec tunnels: ESPv6, AHv6, IKE with IPv6 support, and more.

IPSec Toolkit - Technology Overview

With a powerful C language API, an extensive range of features and wide protocol support, the IPSec Toolkit™ offers a solid platform to rapidly integrate IPSec support into existing or new products.

Multiple OS Platform Support, Portable		F/X Communications' IPSec Toolkit™ supports multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows NT4/2000/2003/XP/Vista/9x/Me, OS/2 and FreeBSD. Being developed in C language and using an OS platform abstraction layer, porting to other Intel platforms is easy.
User-land Implementation		With a user-land implementation, you avoid the complexity and limitations of kernel-mode drivers. "User-land" refers to the arena in which non-operating-system, non-privileged code operates. VPNs can operate well in user-land.
User Application Requirements		The IPSec Toolkit™ operates on raw IP Packets, with MAC headers. Existing networking products are likely to have packet-level access, and if your product is developed from scratch, F/X offers a separate IP packet capture/intercepting developer toolkit. By combining the Packet Intercepting Toolkit with the IPSec Toolkit™, you get everything required to make a fully functional IPSec Server or Client application. The F/X IPSec Toolkit™ includes a fully working and easily compilable IPSec Server/Client template application — ready for your use.

Customer Case / Reference

Synthetics Networks offers highly scalable solutions for network testing, auditing, and operational management. In 2003, Synthetic Networks Inc. (SNI) (now part of Agilent) faced a challenge of rapidly having to integrate complete IPSec and IKE capability into their existing product.

Synthetics Networks develops high performance network testing tools for network equipment manufacturers. In essence, we break network equipment so their customers cannot. Our testing infrastructure must be reliable, scalable, and robust. That is, it must meet or exceed the functionality and quality of the environments it tests. When looking for a toolkit to develop our security testing suite, these same factors governed our selection process. A toolkit that could scale linearly in our environment, that keeps current with functional standards, could be easily tailored to our product without architectural changes, and would exceed the quality offered by our customers. Both the F/X product offering and technical support has exceeded our requirements and expectations. Using their toolkit and support, we integrated the VPN technology into our product line ahead of schedule and are successfully deploying our product. We evaluated other technologies that were more expensive with larger support organizations. We could not be happier with our decision. F/X technology and support has enabled us to offer a high quality comprehensive VPN testing solution to our market space in a very short period of time. We will always look to F/X first as a supplier of our future technology needs. Russ Couturier, Ph.D. Chief Technology Officer. Synthetics Networks

CTC is part of ITOCHU Corporation, one of Japan's leading trading companies with annual sales exceeding $114 billion and currently ranked 10th in Fortune Magazines Global 500 list. ITOCHU Corporation has over 800 subsidiaries and associated companies worldwide and is engaged in a wide variety of business, including information technologies and aerospace.

We were looking to add a full range of professional IPSec/VPN services to a sizable IPv6 trial system for one of Japan's leading telecommunication companies. In our extensive search for the most suitable IPSec development toolkit we came across several competent solutions and yet, as we advanced into the toolkit evaluation phase, FX proved unique in a number of ways. The IPSec Toolkit from FX Communications has an attractive design and its features perfectly matched our requirements. As a matter of fact, even though we initially were at a loss about our decision and concerned with the expense, then by chance, all the pieces came together when we found FX. Moreover, unlike any other vendor, all the concrete facts and detailed technical information we needed was readily available on the FX web-site. For any additional information, our e-mails were answered quickly and accurately. At this point, following several meetings with FX in Denmark, we have started development of the project and we remain fully confident that FX's IPSec enabling technology will help us facilitate our future expansion into the enterprise IPSec/VPN market. Hidetoshi Satomi, General Manager, ITOCHU TECHNO-SCIENCE Corporation (CTC)