The Study of Adaptive Security Appliances Implementation in Virtual Private Network

Abstract

According to USA Today, a website that discussed aboutsecurity network, there were over 130million malicious software programs were released in 2013 mainly to steal personal, business, and financial data from the personal networks, business and the government. Hackers began to develop a malicious threat aimed at military, government, and commercial networks to steal their data so that hackers can use it to blackmail them if they not fulfilling their request. As the grow of malicious threats rising rapidly, many network administrator or IT professionals start to develop security appliances such as firewall, antivirus, and intrusion prevention system to protect against network harms. New security devices are developed as well such as Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA). Therefore, research was carried out to study the reliability of Cisco ASA and its configuration. This research is looking on how ASA combines function of firewall, Authentication, Authorization and Accounting protocols (AAA protocols) in virtual private network. The research is conducted using simulation software namely Cisco Packet Tracer by establishing a small-scale network model. The configurations include the application of Access-Control List, configuring the security-level of the network to separate between inside network (private) and outside network (public). Therefore, with proper configurations, any unauthorized access from the outside network are unable to gain entry to the private network to steal confidential data and to installmalware.