In my last blog post, we discussed the advantages of using the CipherGraph Cloud VPN solution to connect the Amazon VPC environment from office LANs or homes or any other locations. In this post, we will discuss how to deploy the CipherGraph solution to connect your VPC resources.
Here are the steps to deploy the CipherGraph Cloud Access Gateway (CAG).
CipherGraph Cloud Access Gateway(CAG) Server Setup
1. Create a VPC environment with at least 1 Public subnet and Multiple Private Subnets as shown in the below diagram.
2. Select the CipherGraph Cloud Access Gateway AMI from Amazon Marketplace and create an instance within your public subnet of your VPC network
3. Please create at least with an m1.small instance, and follow the launch configuration steps
4. CipherGraph will create a new Security Group and a couple of rules also as part of the launch configuration. Please keep those rules as it is for testing, for production VPC you can change the rules as per your security compliance.
5. Associate an Elastic IP Address to the Instance
6. After the Instance Launch is complete, you can now open the CAG management console. You can access it by using the https://<Assigned Elastic IP Address>:9080/. For example, if the Elastic IP Address you assigned was 54.25.190.25 then the management console is at https://54.25.190.25:9080
username : cgnadmin
Password : <Your CAG Instance ID>. Example: i-12ab3de
7. After successful login, you can see the CAG management console home page.
8. Change the admin user default password by clicking on “Admin Console” on the left pane.
9. Please go through each menu item in the left pane to make yourself comfortable with the terminology
10. By default, CipherGraph will create the test user called “testuser” and publicly allowed access rule for testing. We will cover the user management and access rules in detail in the next blog post. For now, we will use “testuser” for our testing.
11. CAG cannot apply changes as you make changes to the configurations. In the left navigation menu “Apply Changes” menu item will be visible if you have any changes that still not yet applied. Once you finish your changes, click on “Apply Changes” navigation item and then you may either click on “Apply Changes” to take effect of your changes by CAG or “Discard Changes” to ignore the changes you made
Please add rules for Private Subnets machines security groups to allow the CAG server to communicate with those machines. These are the rules which will be allowed to connect your AWS resources from your Laptop, or Home PC or Tablet
CipherGraph Cloud Access Gateway(CAG) Client Setup (Windows)
We will set up the CAG client application in your users’ laptops, or home PCs to establish a VPN connectivity with the VPC environment using CAG server. Here we will discuss how to set up the CAG client in Windows OS.
- Download the Client Application Installer depending on the OS type which you use and Client Configuration file (ciphergraph.cgn) from the Downloads menu. Also, distribute this installer & config file to the users who need access to the VPC environment. Here we will download the Windows Installer
Install the Client Application Installer and open the “Configure CipherGraph Cloud Access Gateway” utility from your client machine
Import the downloaded configuration file to the above open utility and restart your client machine to take the effect of the change.
Run the “Connect CipherGraph” application from the start menu or Desktop and then click connect
Once connected a new browser window will be opened automatically, please enter your login/password given by your CipherGraph Admin. Here we have used the “testuser” account.
Congratulations! You are now connected to your VPC via CipherGraph CAG. You can start using your VPC resources via SSH, RDP or HTTP, etc.
