Cisco VPN error 403: Unable to contact the security gateway

Question

I'm trying to make a connection via Cisco VPN Client (version is 5.0.07.0290), but i get the below mentioned error. I have to say that i'm using Windows 8.

"Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client. Reason 403: Unable to contact the security gateway."

I've tried several fixes, but none of them worked. The display name in regedit is the correct, and my certificates are ok as well. If i switch to TCP (the default is UDP) i get error 414. Firewall is off.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Last update: Well, we ended up using Group Authentication, so the certificate problem is no longer an issue. Thank you all for the input.

Solution

try these solutions:

Top 10 VPN issues/solutions tech

Users report that the client is terminating when they try to establish a connection

In this situation, users will see an error message is similar to VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client. Reason 403: Unable to contact the security gateway. This error can be caused by a couple of different things:

1. The user might have entered an incorrect group password
2. The user may not have typed the right name or IP address for the remote VPN endpoint.
3. The user may be having other problems with his Internet connection.

Basically, for some reason, the IKE negotiation failed. Check the client logs, enabled by going to Log | Enable, and try to find errors that have Hash Verification Failed to try to further narrow down the problem.

Please the try the following to enable logging for more information:

Cisco VPN error 403

If client logging didnt work try this: Download wireshark and run a trace(reboot your PC so its a clean state) while you are trying to connect through your VPN to see what packet gets dropped and by whom. Then update your question with the logs.

good luck.

Comments

[harrymc]

Does one of the workarounds in this thread help?

[Mariyan]

Unfortunately no. I've already checked this out like few days ago.

[harrymc]

This seems to be a certificate problem, maybe from a previous installation. Try to look for this certificate in your stores, as described in this article.

[Mariyan]

Thanks for the input, but the registry entry in my case was correct, so no change required.

[harrymc]

Please read the paragraph after the registry part.