The roadwarriors carol and dave set up a connection each to gateway moon. The authentication is based on X.509 certificates and matching RSA private keys stored in the PKCS#8 format. moon's key is unencrypted, carol's key is encrypted with the default PKCS#5 v1.5 DES algorithm and dave's key with the PKCS#5 v2.0 AES-128 algorithm.

Upon the successful establishment of the IPsec tunnels, leftfirewall=yes automatically inserts iptables-based firewall rules that let pass the tunneled traffic. In order to test both tunnel and firewall, both carol and dave ping the client alice behind the gateway moon.