AOS, when used as a VPN Gateway, must uniquely identify all network-connected endpoint devices before establishing a connection.

Without identifying devices, unidentified or unknown devices may be introduced, thereby facilitating malicious activity. For distributed architectures (e.g., service-oriented architectures), the decisions regarding the validation of identification claims may be made by services separate from the services acting on those decisions. In such situations, it is necessary to provide the identification decisions (as opposed to the actual identifiers) to the services that need to act on those decisions. This requirement applies to applications that connect locally, remotely, or through a network to an endpoint device (including, but not limited to, workstations, printers, servers outside a datacenter, Voice Over Internet Protocol [VoIP] phones, and video teleconference codecs). Gateways and service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications are examples of where this requirement would apply.