Pre-Shared Keys
With pre-shared keys, the same pre-shared key is configured on each IPSec peer. IKE peers authenticate each other by computing and sending a keyed hash of data that includes the pre-shared key. If the receiving peer is able to independently create the same hash using its pre-shared key, then it knows that both peers must share the same secret, thus authenticating the other peer.
Pre-shared keys are easier to configure than manually configuring IPSec policy values on each IPSec peer. But pre-shared keys don't scale well because each IPSec peer must be configured with the pre-shared key of every other peer with which it will establish a session.