The roadwarrior dave tries to set up a connection to roadwarrior carol but because carol has set the strongswan.conf option initiator_only = yes she ignores the repeated IKE requests sent by dave.

After the failed connection attempt by dave, roadwarrior carol sets up a connection to gateway moon. The authentication is based on Suite B with 128 bit security based on X.509 ECDSA certificates, ECP Diffie-Hellman groups and AES-GCM authenticated encryption.

Upon the successful establishment of the IPsec tunnel, the static IPsec policy rules of an iptables-based firewall let pass the tunneled traffic. In order to test both tunnel and firewall, carol pings the client alice behind the gateway moon.