First published: 10th December 1998
Espoo, Finland, December 10, 1998. - Data Fellows, one of the world's leading developers of anti-virus and encryption software, has set up a demo of the commercial version of F-Secure VPN+, whereby companies can test an encrypted IPSec connection between their own machine and a VPN+ Server at the Data Fellows site. The supported platform is Windows NT 4.0 (Intel) with an Ethernet network adapter. The release works on both single and multi-processor machines.An encrypted IPSec connection can be set up by downloading and installing the F-Secure VPN+ Demo Client, available at the Data Fellows web site (http://www.F-Secure.com/f-secure/vpn-plus/demo/), and connecting through it to the F-Secure VPN+ server. This set-up in no way affects a company's other network traffic; all other hosts and network services may be accessed as usual. Unlike the commercial version of VPN+, it is not possible to create encrypted connections to hosts other than VPNPlus.F-Secure.com. This server cannot be contacted without the VPN+ demo client.
The demo client has been configured to establish an IPSec encrypted (3des) connection to VPNPlus.F-Secure.com (IP:194.252.6.42). A random session key will be negotiated for each connection. Host authentication is performed using a shared secret 0x462D534543555245 (i.e. "F-SECURE" in hex). Access to all other networks (local/Internet) is provided without additional IPSec security.
In the commercial version of F-Secure VPN+, the network administrator determines which connections are permitted and which connections need to be encrypted. The commercial version of the product features F-Secure Administrator for central management, network wide security policy distribution and F-Secure VPN+ Certificate Wizard for a complete VPN Certificate Authority service.
In addition to F-Secure VPN+ Demo Client, a Lotus ScreenCam presentation of F-Secure Administrator can be downloaded, as well as the user's manual of the commercial version. The presentation shows how easily the network administrator can create and maintain a security policy for the whole Virtual Private Network.
End-user installation of the commercial version can be done using AUTOINST network-wide deployment tools and it provides a fully transparent network security solution to the user. No user-interfaces are left to the user to stumble with.