Overview of Virtual Private Networks

Overview of Virtual Private Networks

Outline

Thesis Statement: For many companies, setting up an effective Virtual Private Network (VPN) can extend the company's LAN beyond its walls and save thousands of dollars over time.

I. VPN

A. What is VPN?

B. Categories of VPN

1. Remote Access

2. Intranets

3. Extranets

C. What is needed to start a VPN Build

D. What the users will need to establish a VPN

II. VPN Security

A. Security for the user

B. Security for the data

C. Security for the systems

III. Problems and Benefits with VPN

A. Benefits

B. Problems

IV. VPN is a great idea

Overview of Virtual Private Networks

Remember the days when our LAN was controlled to a certain building, many campus buildings, or a few corporate office floors. Today that isn't enough; our LAN needs to expand to meet the needs of off site workers, business partners and branch locations. All of this plus a means to keep the network data secure and transfers reliable. For this I'm not talking other corporate offices by setting up a WAN and putting Domain Controllers at remote sites with many administrators and massive data replication. I'm talking an extension of the network by using Virtual Private Networking (VPN). For many companies wanting to extend their local LAN resources to field personnel requires setting up an effective VPN to extend the company's LAN beyond its walls and save thousands of dollars. VPN is the answer for remote office workers, remote branches and local network requires from home workers. Additionally, with the needs these days to outsource more, many companies are adopting the use of VPN (DeVeaux).

Back in the late 1980's and until not to long ago, I held a position as Lead Fleet Support representative in the project office at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University (APL). This position required extensive travel to most major cities and to many foreign locations. In the earlier days most of my traffic between the field and APL was via a 9600-baud link most of the time through a satellite from sea or a 14400-baud connection if I could find some place to connect my computer to a phone jack in some strange motel. With this slow connection I can stress to you that a lot of data wasn't exchanged and what was exchanged was compact, sometimes encrypted with some type of encryption or just transmitted in plain text. Most of this traffic was program changes to field projects or unclassified problem reports, which many times the connection would get

lost and require many resends. Even e-mail was hard to upload and download and sometimes required multiple connections to get the complete patch sequence. The dream then was to have a connection system that somehow data traveled from point A to point B in a possible secure method without external encryption devices. With the need for this type of data exchange by major companies and the explosion of the internet, discovery of POP (point of presence or Point-to-Point) to access local Internet Service providers, this allow for a low cost dedicated, secure path, or encrypted IP packet tunneling data exchange between the remote user and the corporate servers.

This is Virtual Private Networking, a secure, low cost dedicated path that has an authentication challenge between the remote user and the server. Many people have refused to make use of this technology for fear of security and performance. Much of that has been corrected and as the use continues these problems will be assessed and corrected in near future. With all these fears, today VPN connections are more secure and there are many reasons to make the jump to VPN if you are currently using just a plain dial-up.

There is a very good article in April 2001 MCP magazine that points to the five best reasons to move from all dial-up to VPN. The biggest reason is just plain high cost for leased lines and long distance services. But the other reasons fall into a very good line behind high costs. For administrators stuck with a pure analog bank, you the administrator will have or could have a difficult time maintaining such modem banks, dealing with proprietary technology, dealing with irate home user with the latest Road Runner Cable modems or DSL when they cannot access your modem bank because of

technology difference or busy signals if they switch to a dial-up modem. Then there are all the different configurations for modems. Back a few years ago, before I made the

switch to PC's and was the pure believer that a MAC attack was the only computer and SLIP (Serial Line Interface Protocol) was the hottest thing out there, but due to all the different and changing modem configurations, maintaining a perfect set of variables was a night mare and trying to establish a connection was enough to the point that a .45 caliber bullet through the modem would at time make you feel better. Now, with ISP's all over, cable modems and DSL in the home, VPN is the way to go. No more phone lines to hassle with, solid secure connections to the server, and almost no configuration problems, VPN is the dream come true for remote LAN connectivity.

There isn't just one plain brown bag of VPN; instead there are three major categories of VPN. These categories consist of or mainly fall into the areas of Remote Access, Intranets, and Extranets. I would like to take each category and give a little explanation of each of these, starting with the Remote Access user. The remote access user, can be a salesman on the road or Senior VP away from the office, it doesn't matter who it is, all that matters is someone is away from the local LAN and needs access to the internal resources. This a accomplished by the user having some type of access to a local ISP. Once the user connects to the ISP, then through one of many protocols (Point