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VPN : The Complete Toolsbox

• This category contains 3 Papers
• The last paper was added on 2007-03-26 (YYYY-MM-DD)

Longest short IP Sec Paper (The)

Published on 2005-01-10, by Nick Vasilyev, ©ConsultPlanet, Inc.,.

Recently it has come to my attention that I don't know as much about VPN as I wanted to know so I started to do research, I was able to find good material on almost every aspect of it except IPSec. Most of the papers I found on it were either too long, or too short, or didn't go in detail enough or were written in about 150% English which made reading them so dry I had to have a high caffeine drink every 10-15 minutes. So I decided to write my own paper to assist other people in their studies of security and IPSec. Now I don't mean to be bashing anyone's work or anything, and I am not saying that this one will be better, but I think there is room on the internet for another IPSec paper. I will try to keep this paper pretty short; I know how everyone hates long papers that seem to go on and on.

Meet OpenVPN

Published on 2004-12-15, by Hans-Cees Speel, ©SSC Publications, Inc..

If your company has people on the road, such as sales or technical people, a VPN is a good method for letting them access data on the company network. Many different VPN solutions can be bought, but many are free. Here, I discuss only solutions you can set up without buying a commercial VPN product.

The main VPN solution used for more complex tasks is IPsec; some people use PPTP. Although PPTP is usable, security flaws have occurred in its past, and it simply does not match up to IPSec.

IPSec in tunnel mode would be a much better solution, were it not for the crippled Windows-client implementation: Windows XP™/2000 clients can't use IPSec in tunnel mode without using L2TP. There is nothing wrong with L2TP security-wise, but it increases latency--through the need for both PPP and L2TP processes--and increases packet-overhead, slowing down connections. Open-source servers have not had much experience with L2TP yet, so using open source for it is problematic at this time.

A disadvantage of plain IPSec is its notorious complexity: many, many things can and do go wrong. To the rescue, then, comes OpenVPN, a full-blown open-source VPN solution based on SSL. OpenVPN offers the same functionality as IPSec in tunnel mode; you can tunnel entire networks through it. In this article, I focus on using OpenVPN as a road warrior's VPN solution.

VPNs and Public Key Infrastructure

Published on 2004-09-23, by Scott Brumbaugh, ©O'Reilly Media, Inc..

The virtual private network (VPN) is increasingly becoming an invaluable part of every business network. With broadband available in more and more places, small- and medium-size businesses are taking advantage of VPN technology and leveraging the investment they've made in their internal private networks, expanding services available to customers, partners, and staff. This article focuses on VPN tunneling. Because it is also necessary to understand the basic principles of data encryption, this article will also summarize the set of technologies that form a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). We will see how to ensure privacy in a virtual private network.