A Virtual Private Network (VPN), as the name indicates, is a private network. VPN is using public network such as telecommunication network or Internet for providing access to individual or remote offices for communicating with their organisations confidentially. VPN transmission can be carried out on public network e.g. Internet with SLA ( Service Level Agreement) between the VPN service provider and the customer. A VPN can able to send any form of data e.g video, voice data or any combination of it between two points across the secured channels.
Authentication mechanism:
VPN can be a secure and cost effective way for organisations to give access between the remote and the corporate network and to communicate between these two. VPN consists of two parts one is “Inside” network which provides administarative and physical security for protection purpose and the second one is “outside” network which is less trustworthy usually internet. Usually there is a firewall between the user’s workstation and the host network. When the client makes communication with the firewall then the client may pass the authentication data to an authentication service within the perimeter. A known authorised person, may be only with authorized device, can be given with some security previleges so that he can acess the resources which otherwise are not available to a normal user.
We can configure the VPN program to pass all the IP traffic through the tunnel when the VPN connection is active, which will increase the security. From the users point of view, whenever the VPN connection is ON, all the outside access should pass through the firewall as if the user is inside the secured network.
Cryptographic tunneling protocols are used for the security of VPNs. So there is security whatever information is sent. When properly used, chosen and implemented, this type of techniques can give secure communications.
VPN protocol includes the following.
IP security: This is the commonly used protovol over the IPv4.
SSL/TLS: It is used for tunneling the network stack. SSL is associated with e-commerce but it has to take help of vendors. The main advantage of SSL is that it can be accessed from any public wireless point to access e-commerce websites while other VPN protocol can not be accessed from public wireless point.
Open VPN: Clients and servers are easily available for all important operating systems.
PPTP:(Point to Point tunneling Protocol)
VPN Quarantine: Here client machine is present to the end of VPN. It has no connection with VPN design.
Cryptographic tunneling is not used in trusted VPNs. Here single network is used to give security.Multi protocol label Switching(MPLS) is used in the trusted VPNs.
Benefits of the Virtual private network:
• Increase in the level of security.
• Transportation cost and transit time is reduced.
• Telecommuter support.
• Large networking capabilities.
• Return on investment is also faster.
• Operational costs are also reduced as compared to WAN.
• Because of the extension in the network some special attension have to be there.
• Security level at the client side should be increased.
• There should be limitation in the main network access.
• Login policies should be revised.
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