Tunnel comparison between Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) and IP Security (IPSec)

Abstract: Since the introduction of networks, they have been used amongst home users, companies and organizations and most damage on the network is due to inappropriate security configurations. To secure networks, a protocol suite can be used to encrypt and authenticate all IP packets of a session. Therefore, this report will include the advantages and possible solution of some techniques used to offer increased network security such as scalability and data confidentiality. Captures of traffic sent using the two security techniques, IPSec/VPN and GRE-Tunnel will be monitored. The objective behind this project is to configure a network with these two different tunneling techniques and compare the security and network performance. The report also describes the security problems encountered by networks such as the ignorance of network users, vulnerabilities and the security of the devices.IPSecis a standard security protocol solution for TCP/IP, and it provides security through authentication, encryption and data integrity. GRE encapsulates packets and create a logical hub-and spoke topology of virtual point-to-point connections. The Jperf-tool is used to measure network performance and show specific details while another tool, Wireshark is used to analyze the information captured during transmission of data sent using IPSEC and GRE. The comparison further finds that IPSec-tunnel technique makes data transfers very secure but causes network performance disadvantages in comparison to a GRE solution.