An enterprise network administrator is deploying a site-to-site IPsec VPN between a corporate headquarters and a remote branch office. The branch office router is positioned behind a service provider gateway performing Port Address Translation (PAT). Diagnostic logs confirm that Phase 1 (IKE) authentication succeeds over UDP port 500. However, Phase 2 fails to establish a functional data tunnel. Further analysis reveals that the security policy is configured to use IPsec Authentication Header (AH) in tunnel mode. Which of the following root causes best explains why the IPsec VPN tunnel fails to operate across the PAT gateway?
- IPsec AH calculates an Integrity Check Value across the entire IP header, causing integrity validation failures at the destination because PAT modifies header fields during translation.Cevap
- BIPsec AH operates exclusively at Layer 4 of the OSI model, making it incapable of encapsulating Layer 3 IP headers required for site-to-site routing across public networks.
- CPhase 2 tunnel negotiation requires TCP port 500 for stateful session establishment, which is blocked by the PAT gateway's default session table behavior.
- DThe main office firewall requires IPsec AH traffic to be encapsulated within TCP port 443 to bypass PAT devices, rather than using standard IPsec protocol numbers.
Cevap
IPsec AH calculates an Integrity Check Value across the entire IP header, causing integrity validation failures at the destination because PAT modifies header fields during translation.
The correct answer identifies that IPsec Authentication Header (AH) computes its Integrity Check Value (ICV) over the entire IP packet, including header fields like IP addresses and ports. When a PAT gateway modifies these fields to route packets across public subnets, the receiver recalculates the ICV and detects a discrepancy, dropping the traffic. AH is fundamentally incompatible with NAT/PAT for this reason.
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