HOWTO: Cisco ASA AnyConnect RADIUS Authentication with NPS

Following up on my previous AnyConnect how-to, this post shows how to configure a Cisco ASA to authenticate against a Windows Network Policy Server (NPS) using RADIUS.

First, configure a aaa-server group with the radius protocol.

asa01(config)# aaa-server RADIUS protocol radius
asa01(config-aaa-server-group)# exit
asa01(config)#

Next, specify your NPS server and pre-shared-key.

asa01(config)# aaa-server RADIUS (inside) host 10.24.12.2
asa01(config-aaa-server-host)# key pr3-shar3d-k3y
asa01(config-aaa-server-host)# exit
asa01(config)#

On your NPS server, launch NPS.

HOWTO: Basic Cisco ASA AnyConnect VPN 8.3+

This is a brief how-to style guide for configuring an AnyConnect remote access VPN on an ASA running version 8.3(1) or greater.  The example below uses split tunneling and local authentication.  RADIUS authentication will be covered in a future post. (update: see here)

Before beginning, verify you have the AnyConnect essentials license (without this license, only two simultaneous sessions are permitted).

asa# sh ver | inc AnyConnect
AnyConnect Premium Peers          : 25             perpetual
AnyConnect Essentials             : 25             perpetual
AnyConnect for Mobile             : Enabled        perpetual
AnyConnect for Cisco VPN Phone    : Enabled        perpetual
asa#

ASA pre-8.3 vs post-8.3 NAT explained

In ASA software version 8.3(1), Cisco completely restructured ASA NAT syntax.  Quite a bit has already been written about these changes. However, since this is often a cause of confusion, I will try to provide an explanation of three of the most commonly used forms of NAT on an ASA: dynamic PAT, static NAT, and "nonat."  Below you'll find pre-8.3 and post-8.3 configuration examples with translations into into plain English.  Please feel free to comment if you have any questions.

What is NAT?

I'll start with the basics.  NAT stands for network address translation.  It translates the real IP address of a device to the mapped IP and vice versa.

Real IP: the actual IP address of the device generating the traffic (on the inside interface in the examples below)
Mapped IP: the IP address the ASA translates the real IP address to (on the outside interface in the examples below).

NAT is most often used to translate private RFC 1918 IP addresses to publicly routable IP addresses (there are other less common uses as well).

For example:
A ping is sent from TestVM (192.168.10.2) to R1 (72.163.4.166).  In this example, R1 is on the internet, so the ASA cannot route the private address of 192.168.10.2 to R1.  It must NAT the packet.

We can see this happen in the Wireshark captures below:

ASA Hairpinning and TCP state bypass

So what is hairpinning, anyway?  Hairpinning is when traffic received on an interface is immediately routed back out the same interface.  If you visualize the packet flow, it looks something like a hairpin:

The command "same-security-traffic permit intra-interface" allows us to hairpin traffic on an ASA.  The most common use case is allowing remote access VPN traffic to traverse a site to site VPN tunnel as shown in the diagram above.

However, since we have the ability to hairpin VPN traffic, it seems safe to assume that we can hairpin other traffic as well.

Let’s look at the following scenario: