Download Cisco anyconnect VPN client for Mac (Version 4.2.03013) When the download process is complete, open your Downloads folder and double-click the AnyConect dmg file. Step 1 Install Cisco anyconnect VPN client for Mac OS X. Download Cisco VPN Client for Mac - Straightforward utility designed to enable its users to effortlessly establish connections between their Macs and a Virtual Private Network (VPN) using a Cisco VPN device. Mac OS X 10.4 or later (Universal Binary) file size: 15.4 MB filename. Mac running Mac OS X (v10.4-10.5.x). This VPN Client is a “Universal” application that runs on both Intel and Power PC Mac models. NOTE - If your Mac is running Mac OS X 10.2-10.3.9 you need to install Cisco VPN Client v4.6.x. From your home Mac you must already be able to get onto the Internet by having an account with an Internet Service.
MAC VPN SETUP
This page describes how to install and configure Cisco AnyConnect on Mac/OS clients. Cisco allows you to securely sign into your VPN connection. Before installing Cisco, make sure you have completed the VPN request process and have approval for VPN access.
If you have any questions or need technical support, please contact SalukiTech by email at salukitech@siu.edu or over the phone at 618/453-5155.
- Setting Up VPN
- Signing into VPN
This process should be performed on the machine you will be using remotely (at home) to access your University work machine.
1. Download theCisco AnyConnect clientinstaller from here: Cisco VPN - AnyConnect Installer. You will need to sign-in using your SIU Network ID (SIU85XXXXXXX) and password to access the download file.
2. Open the .dmg file you downloaded by double-clicking on the file in the download location (or wherever you chose to save the downloaded file).
3. You should now see the Mac OS X Anyconnect installer .pkg file. Double-click this file to begin the installation process.
4. You should be presented with the Install AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client installer window. Click Continue.
5. You will be taken to the Software License Agreement page. Click Continue.
6. In order to continue the installation, you must agree to the terms of the license agreement. Click Agree.
7. You will be given the option to Change Install Location. Normally the default install location is fine. Click Install.
8. You will need to authenticate with administrative privileges in order for the installation to continue. Enter your local administrative account information and click Install Software.
9. Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client will install and when finished, you should see a screen similar to the following.
10. Click Close to complete the installation process.
1.Open the Cisco AnyConnect client by clicking the AnyConnect icon in your Applications folder.
2. You should see a screen similar to the following. Enter private.siu.edu into the blank field and click the Connect button.
3. You will be presented with additional fields of information to fill in relating to your VPN logon credentials.
4. Enter your SIU network ID (siu85XXXXXXX) and password in the Username and Password fields.
5. For the Second Password field, enter one of the following options:
- push = Sends a push notification to the DUO application on your phone
- sms = Sends an SMS message with a code to your phone
- XXXXXX = The six-digit code generated by the DUO application on your phone
Note:DUO Push notifications are the preferred method of authentication. Duo is a mobile app for your iphone or Android device that allows you to approve or deny login attempts. To use this option,you must first install DUO onto your mobile device.
6. If you selected the DUO/Push option, you should receive a DUO notification on your phone that looks similar to the following:
7. You are given the option to Approve or Deny the login. Click Approve if the request on your phone is from a recognized source.
8. You should now be connected to the SIU Cisco VPN. You will see a screen similar to the following, confirming you are connected to the VPN.
Confirmed working on OS X High Sierra
The proprietary CiscoVPN Mac client is somewhat buggy. It is possible to use the IPSec VPN software included with Mac OS X instead. This tutorial shows you how to migrate from CiscoVPNto the native OS X IPSec VPN by decrypting passwords saved in CiscoVPN PCF files.
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Open up your System Prefrences and select 'Network'. Click on the little + button at the bottom of the window to create a new connection.
Pick 'VPN' for the Interface and set its type to 'Cisco IPSec'. It doesn't matter what you set as the service name.
Copy the 'Host' setting from CiscoVPN...
to the 'Server Address' setting in your System Prefrences' and enter your username under 'Account Name'. You probably don't want to enter your passwordunless you are OK with the system saving it.
On Mac OS X, PCF files are usually found in /private/etc/CiscoSystemsVPNClient/Profiles. Open up /Applications/Terminal and type the following:
You should get something like this:
Find that long list of letters and numbers after enc_GroupPwd= and copy it. Also make note of the GroupName - you'll need that in a bit as well.
Paste that sequence of characters into the fancy schmancy decoder ring below and click 'Decode'. (pops up a new window)
Fancy Schmancy Decoder Ring
As an example, this should return 'letmein' as the password:
Thanks to HAL-9000 at evilscientists.de and Massar's work on cisco-decrypt.c for the magic here. A JavaScript implementation also exists here: https://github.com/artemkin/cisco-password-decoder.
Click 'Authentication Settings' back in the Network Prefrences screen. Enter the resulting decoded password into the 'Shared Secret' section of the new VPN connection and set the GroupName from above as well.
Click 'OK', make sure 'Show VPN status in menu bar' is checked and click 'Apply'.
At the top of your screen you should have a little VPN icon. Try connecting to your new VPN.
If everything goes as planned, you should see your connection time counting up at the top of your screen.
How to get your VPN settings out of the built-in mac VPN client.
You don't need the Fancy Schmancy Decoder Ring to get your settings back out of the built-inMac VPN client. Just head over to the Keychain Access application (under Applications -> Utilities) and search for 'VPN'. Double-click your IPSec Shared Secret to open up the window. Clicking 'Show Password' will reveal the secret sauce after you authenticate.
Cisco Anyconnect Vpn Download Mac
If things seem to get hung-up and you are unable to reconnect your VPN without a reboot, Rick R mentions that you might try killing the 'racoon' process.
Racoon is an IPsec key management daemon and is part of the KAME IPsec tools. Kill it by running 'Activity Monitor' in the 'Utilities' folder, finding it in the process list and clicking 'Quit Process' at the upper left of the Activity Monitor window.
Look in your system.log by running the Console app for hints at what might be going wrong. Here's the system.log from aworking VPN setup / take down.
Disconnects
Dave Ma's VPN would disconnect after 45 minutes of uptime. Fotos Georgiadis on an Apple forum threadsuggested changing the IPSec proposal lifetime within racoon to 24 hours instead of 3600 seconds.(3600 seconds is 1 hour - who knows why people are seeing drops at 45 minutes)Here's how that is done.
Connect to the VPN (so OSX dynamically generates a racoon configuration file)
Open Terminal on Mac (Applications --> Utilities--> Terminal)
Copy the generated configuration file to /etc/racoon:
sudo cp /var/run/racoon/XXXXXX.conf /etc/racoon**where: XXXXXX is the name or ip address of your VPN server**
Edit the racoon configuration file with your favorite editor (pico):
sudo pico /etc/racoon/racoon.confAt the bottom of the racoon.conf file, comment out the line:
# include '/var/run/racoon/*.conf';(by added the '#' to the beginning of the line)
And instead include the copied file (which we will edit):
include '/etc/racoon/XXXXXX.conf';(don't forget to replace XXXXXX with the actual name of your file)
Edit the generated configuration file with your favorite editor (pico):
sudo pico /etc/racoon/XXXXXX.confDisable dead peer detection:
dpd_delay 0;Change proposal check to claim from obey:
proposal_check claim;Change the proposed lifetime in each proposal (24 hours instead of 3600 seconds):
lifetime time 24 hours;*note: make sure you change all the 'proposed lifetime' sections and not just one.
Disconnect and reconnect (this time racoon will use your custom configuration).
Now try using your VPN for more than 45 minutes and it shouldn't drop.
So does all your traffic flow through the VPN when you are connected or just traffic to the protected networks? Cisco VPN servers normally send out a list of routes to private networks so you don't end up sending all of your traffic through the VPN server. The reasoning behind this is why protect it if the traffic is destined for an insecure network anyway? The native OS X Cisco VPN adds these routes automatically and removes them when you disconnect. That's one of the things that differentiates the Cisco VPN client from the standard IPSec client. Let's take a look at what gateway is used when sending traffic to apple.com from within the Terminal application:
Notice the 'gateway' line there? Traffic to apple.com is going out 192.168.1.1 which is my normal Internet gatewayso it is skipping the VPN entirely.
Let's try an IP on a protected private network: (10.1.2.3)
In this case, the gateway is 172.131.25.12 which is a fake IP on the far end of the VPN which will eventually route traffic to 10.1.2.3. So when sending data to 10.1.2.3, I am going through the VPN and that traffic is encrypted.
So how does it know what gateway to use for different IPs? Let's take a look at the routing table:
I've lopped off a bunch of irrelevant lines but as you can see we have two 'default' routes. If a destination isn'texplicitly matched below, the traffic will flow through the first default route from the top. So in this case, ifthe destination isn't within 10.1/16 (which means 10.1.*.*) we will go through our default route of 192.168.1.1. Ifit is, we would go through 172.131.25.12 which is our VPN.
Cisco Vpn For Mac Download
But what if you just wanted to send everything through your VPN connection? We could just delete the first default route and let everything go over the VPN, but this is presumably dangerous because the encrypted traffic probably uses the default route to get to the VPN server in the first place. Let's see:
Yep, it does. So if we are going to remove the default route to 192.168.1.1, we have to make sure we have an explicitroute below to the VPN server. (1.2.3.4) You will notice above that my Cisco VPN server adds this route automatically, but if yours isn't configured that way you can add it like this:
It is safe to try this if you already have the route because the command will just fail.
Cisco Vpn Software For Mac
The next thing we are going to do is a little dangerous and remove all your network access. A reboot should be your weapon of last resort to get your networking back but you might also want to print these instructions out so you havethem. You have been warned!
Now let's do the dangerous bit and rip the first default route away:
Now let's check to see if we can still get to our VPN server:
Yep, looks good.
Now let's look at the wider Internet by seeing how we get to apple.com: (17.172.224.47 - we aren't using apple.com here because we don't want to depend on DNS working)
Whoops, something is wrong! That's because that first route there is a little deceptive. It isn't aroute to the IP of the gateway, just a route to the VPN tunnel device utun0. We'll need to say what IPto go to. Let's add a default route to the VPN's fakenet gateway address: (which we already have as the gateway in most other routes)
OK, let's see which way packets go to get to apple.com: (17.172.224.47)
Yep, looks like the right way.
Now let's try pinging google.com: (apple.com doesn't respond to pings)
Looks like it works. If it doesn't work, your VPN server likely doesn't allow general Internet access throughVPN connections. If this is the case, you are out of luck. Hopefully you know someone influential in the ITdepartment that can change this for you.
Because we removed the normal default route, when we shut down our VPN we'll be stuck without a default route.To add that back in after the VPN goes down, do this:
And we should be back to normal.
Ideally we do these things automatically when the VPN comes up. The easiest way to do this is to have yourVPN administrator set that up as a policy for you. Alternatively, you can create scripts that run on VPN startup.Create /etc/ppp/ip-up and add whatever lines you came up with above to that and mark that file as executablewith:
Similarly, /etc/ppp/ip-down will be run on VPN shutdown. Reverse your commands in that file and you shouldhave a completely automated setup.
Happy tunneling!
-Anders Brownworth
About Me:
Name:Anders Brownworth
Home: Cambridge, MA, USA
Work: Mobile application and GSM research at Bandwidth.Play: Technology, World Traveler and Helicopter Pilot
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