Category: Security

Been porting workloads from AWS to GCE lately and one big piece of infrastructure that I rely on is pfSense.

pfSense is a FreeBSD based appliance which does advanced routing, firewall and VPN for your cloud-based infrastructure. Using pfSense, one can establish IPSEC tunnels between the various AWS regions and the clients office network. While pfSense is available from the AWS Marketplace, it’s currently not yet available on Google Cloud.

StrongSwan is a viable replacement for environments where pfSense is not an option. Below is a working “site to site” StrongSwan configuration running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS GCE instance and works with pfSense 2.2. Please note that pfSense 2.2 has moved from racoon to StrongSwan.

# apt-get install strongswan
conn myconn
  reqid = 1
  fragmentation = yes
  keyexchange = ikev1
  reauth = yes
  forceencaps = no
  rekey = yes
  installpolicy = yes
  type = tunnel
  dpdaction=restart
  dpddelay = 10s
  dpdtimeout = 60s
  auto = route
  left =  10.240.x.x # my private IP as assigned to eth0 on GCE instance 
  right = 103.x.x.x # the site I am connecting to
  leftid = 1.2.3.4 # my GCE ephemeral / static IP
  ikelifetime = 28800s
  lifetime = 3600s
  ike = aes256-sha1-modp1024!
  esp = aes256-sha1!
  leftauth = psk
  rightauth = psk
  rightid = 103.x.x.x # the site I am connecting to
  aggressive = no
  rightsubnet = 192.168.x.0/24 # my office private subnet
  leftsubnet = 10.240.0.0/16 # my GCE private network