[2026 January Tips & Tricks] Why It’s Time to Move Your VPN Encryption to AES-GCM

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AES-GCM (Galois/Counter Mode) is currently the gold standard for encryption in modern VPNs (like IPsec and TLS). In this short blog we will walk through AES-GCM with you and most importantly help you adapt to the latest technology to stay safe.

AES-GCM is an AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data) algorithm. This is the most important concept to grasp.

• Old Way (AES-CBC): In older VPN configurations, encryption and authentication were two separate steps. You would use AES-CBC to hide the data (confidentiality) and a separate hash like SHA-256 (HMAC) to make sure no one tampered with it (integrity). This "stitch-them-together" approach led to many implementation errors and vulnerabilities.
• New Way (AES-GCM): GCM handles both encryption and integrity verification in a single, highly efficient operation. It ensures that the data is encrypted and that it hasn't been tampered with, all at once.

As a result, AES-GCM is way superior to older modes like AES-CBC for two main reasons: performance and security.

💡Performance

The biggest practical difference among AES-GCM vs AES-CBC:

• AES-CBC (serial): CBC stands for "Cipher Block Chaining." To encrypt Block 2, you must wait for Block 1 to finish, because the result of Block 1 is fed into Block 2. This is a serial process. You cannot encrypt the next block until the previous one is done.
• AES-GCM (parallel): GCM uses "Counter Mode" for encryption. It turns the block cipher into a stream cipher using a counter. That means Block 1, Block 2, and Block 100 can all be encrypted simultaneously.

Because of this parallelism, AES-GCM can fully utilize modern multi-core CPUs and hardware acceleration instructions (like AES-NI on Intel/AMD or ARM Crypto extensions), often resulting in faster throughput compared to CBC on the same hardware.

🛡️Security

AES-CBC requires data to be split into fixed blocks (16 bytes). If your data isn't exactly 16 bytes, you have to add "padding" to fill the empty space.

• The problem: If a VPN firewall leaks slight timing differences or error messages when it encounters "bad padding," a hacker can trick the server into decrypting the traffic byte-by-byte. These are called Padding Oracle Attacks (famous examples include "Lucky 13" and "POODLE").
• Way out: AES-GCM is a stream cipher mode. It does not use padding at all. Therefore, it is completely immune to padding oracle attacks.

AES-GCM is commonly adapted in the industry and becomes the dominant standard in:

• TLS 1.3: The latest standard for web security (HTTPS) mandates the use of AEAD ciphers like AES-GCM. It completely dropped support for older CBC modes.
• IPsec / IKEv2: Almost all modern enterprise firewalls (Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco) and OS implementations (Windows, macOS, Linux) prioritize AES-GCM in their default proposals.
• Compliance: Governments (e.g., the US NSA's "CNSA Suite") generally require AES-GCM for protecting classified data.

🔔Why Zyxel encourage our customers to change to AES-GCM?

If your firewall (or the VPN client) does not utilize AES-GCM, three things will happen, ranging from "annoying" to "critical failure":

1. Performance degradation

The connection will fall back to an older cipher like AES-CBC. Because CBC cannot be parallelized, your VPN throughput will drop significantly, and the CPU usage on your gateway will spike. A router that can do 1Gbps on GCM might struggle to do 300Mbps on CBC.

2. Connection failure (proposal mismatch)

If the remote peer (e.g., a strict cloud provider, a high-security partner, or a modern client) has a security policy that enforces AEAD/GCM-only, the connection will fail to establish entirely. You will see "Phase 2 Proposal Mismatch" or "No Proposal Chosen" errors in your logs.

3. Security vulnerability

You are forced to use AES-CBC. Unless your implementation of CBC is patched perfectly against "Lucky 13" and other padding attacks (which is difficult to achieve), your traffic could theoretically be intercepted and decrypted by a sophisticated attacker on the path.

📣Call to action

Always configure your VPN Phase 2 (IPsec) proposals to prioritize AES-GCM-128 (or 256) over all other options. Only keep AES-CBC enabled as a fallback for legacy devices that literally cannot speak anything else.

Let’s walk through steps to select AES-GCM in VPN settings of the USG FLEX H series firewall.

📌Note. uOS v1.37 is required to unlock the AES-GCM support. Upgrade the firmware before proceeding to configure AES-GCM.

1. Surf to the VPN > IPSec VPN settings page, in the IKE version choose “IKEv2”.

2. In the Phase 1 settings page, from the drop down list choose “AES128GCM” under the Encryption column, and “PRF-SHA256” under Authentication/PRF column.

3. In the Phase 2 settings page, from the drop down list choose “AES128GCM” under the Encryption column.

💭Take the Next Step

If you haven’t enabled AES-GCM yet, now is the time. Upgrade to uOS v1.37 and configure AES-GCM in your Phase 2 VPN settings to unlock better performance and stronger security. We’d love to hear how the transition goes and what benefits you see in your VPN deployments.