Customer Reviews

A Technical Guide to IPSec Virtual Private Networks

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have received and viewed several comments about my book - some good and some bad. I will be the first to tell you that the book is technically sound, but my grammar was less than spectacular. I have spent a great deal of time working with IPSec and various vendors developing IPSec solutions and products. From this experience I felt compelled to write about IPSec and the idiosyncrasies it demands.
If you expect a technical guide on IPSec, this is the book for you. It details the protocol and provides insight into the diverse security characteristics IPSec employs. If you decide to venture into this book I truly hope you enjoy reading about this interesting technology as much as I did writing about it.
Please feel free to send me your comments... good and bad :)

I was lucky enough to come across this book at a book show in New York. I am happy to see that an author has seen fit to properly address what is becoming a hot technology for enterprise businesses as well as service providers. Mr. Tiller obviously speaks from the voice of experience, as opposed to some works I have seen which are products of cut and paste artists. I particularly enjoyed the section on IKE. This is a commonly misunderstood yet essential component in any secure remote access architecture. The book is easy enough for most security neophytes to understand yet still meaty enough to satisfy and teach veteran bit-heads. Read this book and then keep it nearby. I hope the author has more books planned, this was great.

This book gives a comprehensive overview of IPSec and is certainly a better starting point than the original RFCs with their courier fonts, ascii graphics, and twisty mazes of footnotes. But you can only have so much overview before getting to the details. At that point, I suggest you go back to the RFCs: they are better written, contain fewer errors, and have a subtle sense of humor almost makes them fun to read.

This book seems to be the best available now, but it needs extensive editing and restructuring to make it a really good book. You'll probably want to get the "Big Book of IPSec RFCs" to go with it.

Mr Tiller has great command of knowledge in this field. Very insightful yet easy to read.

As an expert in TCP/IP (I implemented whole TCP/IP protocol suites for the embedded market among other things), I opened Mr. Tiller's book with interest, as I am in the process of implementing an IpSec VPN feature on a particular product.
First of all I spent time reading those parts of the book on which I DID have significant knowledge, just to see how the author deals with those subjects (ARP, RARP, NAT, L2TP). The explanations were not only poorly written but many were also false or misleading.
For example:
- The author attempts to explain NAT translation without showing port translation, something that would make no sense.
- The author explains RARP without referring to DHCP or to why would someone send a RARP query.
- The author has factual errors about L2TP, in fact many of the descriptions relate to another protocol, PPTP, not to L2TP.
- The explanation of why TTL is not covered by a pseudo header is so confusing, instead of the plain simple explanation that you are not able to use a field that changes along the way.
The few parts I read related to my needs, IpSec, looked pretty weak. I'll keep searching for an IpSec book worth reading.

One of the most poorly written books I've ever read.
For example, on page 4, the acronym PIN is spelled out (Personal Identification Number -- duh), but the acronyms CHAP and PAP are used in the next paragraph with no discussion -- plus you don't need to know them for another 100 pages anyway. Page after page are likely this -- very frustrating to try to read.
Consider "Virtual Private Networks" by Yuan and Strayer.