Difference between soft lifetime and hard life time in IPSEC VPN

fatboy1607 — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 05:50:36 GMT

Could someone help me understand Difference between soft lifetime and hard life time in IPSEC VPN

Re: Difference between soft lifetime and hard life time in IPSEC VPN

kbiswas — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 18:30:27 GMT

Soft lifetime:
The time interval after which a router/firewall creates a new IPSEC SA (identified by its SPI value) before the existing IPSEC SA one is expires is called IPSEC Soft Lifetime

Hard Lifetime:
The time interval after which an existing IPSEC SA (currently being used for encryption and decryption) expires is called IPSEC Hard Lifetime

Soft Lifetime is always less than the Hard Lifetime.
Eg: If the IPSEC SA lifetime is 3600 secs/1 hour then this is called IPSEC Hard Life time.
The IPSEC Soft Lifetime would be 80% of 3600sec/1hr, that is 2880 secs

The exact value depends upon vendor implementation.

Hope this helps.
Kunal

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Difference between soft lifetime and hard life time in IPSEC VPN

Re: Difference between soft lifetime and hard life time in IPSEC VPN