Virtual private network

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VPN connectivity overview

A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network, such as the Internet. It enables a computer or network-enabled device to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if it were directly connected to the private network, while benefiting from the functionality, security and management policies of the private network.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> A VPN is created by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated connections, virtual tunneling protocols, or traffic encryptions. Major implementations of VPNs include OpenVPN and IPsec.

A VPN connection across the Internet is similar to a wide area network (WAN) link between websites. From a user perspective, the extended network resources are accessed in the same way as resources available within the private network.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> One major limitation of traditional VPNs is that they are point-to-point, and do not tend to support or connect broadcast domains. Therefore communication, software, and networking, which are based on layer 2 and broadcast packets, such as NetBIOS used in Windows networking, may not be fully supported or work exactly as they would on a real LAN. Variants on VPN, such as Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), and layer 2 tunneling protocols, are designed to overcome this limitation.

VPNs allow employees to securely access their company's intranet while traveling outside the office. Similarly, VPNs securely connect geographically separated offices of an organization, creating one cohesive network. VPN technology is also used by individual Internet users to secure their wireless transactions, to circumvent geo restrictions and censorship, and to connect to proxy servers for the purpose of protecting personal identity and location.Template:Cn

Type

Early data networks allowed VPN-style remote connectivity through dial-up modems or through leased line connections utilizing Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) virtual circuits, provisioned through a network owned and operated by telecommunication carriers. These networks are not considered true VPNs because they passively secure the data being transmitted by the creation of logical data streams.<ref>Cisco Systems, et al.. Internet working Technologies Handbook, Third Edition. Cisco Press, 2000, p. 232.</ref> They have been replaced by VPNs based on IP and IP/Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Networks, due to significant cost-reductions and increased bandwidth<ref>Lewis, Mark. Comparing, Designing. And Deploying VPNs. Cisco Press, 20069, p. 5</ref> provided by new technologies such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)<ref>International Engineering Consortium. Digital Subscriber Line 2001. Intl. Engineering Consortium, 2001, p. 40.</ref> and fiber-optic networks.

VPNs can be either remote-access (connecting a computer to a network) or site-to-site (connecting two networks). In a corporate setting, remote-access VPNs allow employees to access their company's intranet from home or while traveling outside the office, and site-to-site VPNs allow employees in geographically disparate offices to share one cohesive virtual network. A VPN can also be used to interconnect two similar networks over a dissimilar middle network; for example, two IPv6 networks over an IPv4 network.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

VPN systems may be classified by:

  • the protocols used to tunnel the traffic.
  • the tunnel's termination point location, e.g., on the customer edge or network-provider edge.
  • whether they offer site-to-site or network-to-network connectivity.
  • the levels of security provided.
  • the OSI layer they present to the connecting network, such as Layer 2 circuits or Layer 3 network connectivity.

Security mechanisms

To prevent disclosure of private information, VPNs typically allow only authenticated remote access and make use of encryption techniques.

VPNs provide security by the use of tunneling protocols and through security procedures such as encryption. The VPN security model provides:

Secure VPN protocols include the following:

</ref> to solve the issues SSL/TLS has with tunneling over UDP.

Trademark Applications and Registrations Retrieval (TARR)</ref>

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Authentication

Tunnel endpoints must be authenticated before secure VPN tunnels can be established. User-created remote-access VPNs may use passwords, biometrics, two-factor authentication or other cryptographic methods. Network-to-network tunnels often use passwords or digital certificates. They permanently store the key to allow the tunnel to establish automatically, without intervention from the user.

Routing

Tunneling protocols can operate in a point-to-point network topology that would theoretically not be considered a VPN, because a VPN by definition is expected to support arbitrary and changing sets of network nodes. But since most router implementations support a software-defined tunnel interface, customer-provisioned VPNs often are simply defined tunnels running conventional routing protocols.

Provider-provisioned VPN building-blocks

Depending on whether a provider-provisioned VPN (PPVPN)Template:Clarify operates in layer 2 or layer 3, the building blocks described below may be L2 only, L3 only, or combine them both. Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) functionality blurs the L2-L3 identity.Template:Citation neededTemplate:Or

RFC 4026 generalized the following terms to cover L2 and L3 VPNs, but they were introduced in RFC 2547.<ref>*****o</ref> More information on the devices below can also be found in Lewis, Cisco Press.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Customer (C) devices

A device that is within a customer's network and not directly connected to the service provider's network. C devices are not aware of the VPN.

Customer Edge device (CE)

A device at the edge of the customer's network which provides access to the PPVPN. Sometimes it's just a demarcation point between provider and customer responsibility. Other providers allow customers to configure it.

Provider edge device (PE)

A PE is a device, or set of devices, at the edge of the provider network which connects to customer networks through CE devices and presents the provider's view of the customer site. PEs are aware of the VPNs that connect through them, and maintain VPN state.

Provider device (P)

A P device operates inside the provider's core network and does not directly interface to any customer endpoint. It might, for example, provide routing for many provider-operated tunnels that belong to different customers' PPVPNs. While the P device is a key part of implementing PPVPNs, it is not itself VPN-aware and does not maintain VPN state. Its principal role is allowing the service provider to scale its PPVPN offerings, for example, by acting as an aggregation point for multiple PEs. P-to-P connections, in such a role, often are high-capacity optical links between major locations of providers.

User-visible PPVPN service

This section deals with the types of VPN considered in the IETF.

OSI Layer 2 services

Virtual LAN

A Layer 2 technique that allows for the coexistence of multiple LAN broadcast domains, interconnected via trunks using the IEEE 802.1Q trunking protocol. Other trunking protocols have been used but have become obsolete, including Inter-Switch Link (ISL), IEEE 802.10 (originally a security protocol but a subset was introduced for trunking), and ATM LAN Emulation (LANE).

Virtual private LAN service (VPLS)

Developed by IEEE, VLANs allow multiple tagged LANs to share common trunking. VLANs frequently comprise only customer-owned facilities. Whereas VPLS as described in the above section (OSI Layer 1 services) supports emulation of both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint topologies, the method discussed here extends Layer 2 technologies such as 802.1d and 802.1q LAN trunking to run over transports such as Metro Ethernet.

As used in this context, a VPLS is a Layer 2 PPVPN, rather than a private line, emulating the full functionality of a traditional local area network (LAN). From a user standpoint, a VPLS makes it possible to interconnect several LAN segments over a packet-switched, or optical, provider core; a core transparent to the user, making the remote LAN segments behave as one single LAN.<ref>Bombus<ref name="xeps-dnock">Template:Citation</ref></ref>

In a VPLS, the provider network emulates a learning bridge, which optionally may include VLAN service.

Pseudo wire (PW)

PW is similar to VPWS, but it can provide different L2 protocols at both ends. Typically, its interface is a WAN protocol such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode or Frame Relay. In contrast, when aiming to provide the appearance of a LAN contiguous between two or more locations, the Virtual Private LAN service or IPLS would be appropriate.

Ethernet over IP tunneling

EtherIP (RFC 3378) is an Ethernet over IP tunneling protocol specification. EtherIP has only packet encapsulation mechanism. It has no confidentiality nor message integrity protection. EtherIP was introduced in the FreeBSD network stack <ref>Glyn M Burton: RFC 3378 EtherIP with FreeBSD, 03 February 2011</ref> and the SoftEther VPN<ref name="net-security.org">net-security.org news: Multi-protocol SoftEther VPN becomes open source, January 2014</ref> server program.

IP-only LAN-like service (IPLS)

A subset of VPLS, the CE devices must have L3 capabilities; the IPLS presents packets rather than frames. It may support IPv4 or IPv6.

OSI Layer 3 PPVPN architectures

This section discusses the main architectures for PPVPNs, one where the PE disambiguates duplicate addresses in a single routing instance, and the other, virtual router, in which the PE contains a virtual router instance per VPN. The former approach, and its variants, have gained the most attention.

One of the challenges of PPVPNs involves different customers using the same address space, especially the IPv4 private address space.<ref>Address Allocation for Private Internets, RFC 1918, Y. Rekhter et al.,February 1996</ref> The provider must be able to disambiguate overlapping addresses in the multiple customers' PPVPNs.

BGP/MPLS PPVPN

In the method defined by RFC 2547, BGP extensions advertise routes in the IPv4 VPN address family, which are of the form of 12-byte strings, beginning with an 8-byte Route Distinguisher (RD) and ending with a 4-byte IPv4 address. RDs disambiguate otherwise duplicate addresses in the same PE.

PEs understand the topology of each VPN, which are interconnected with MPLS tunnels, either directly or via P routers. In MPLS terminology, the P routers are Label Switch Routers without awareness of VPNs.

Virtual router PPVPN

The Virtual Router architecture,<ref>RFC 2917, A Core MPLS IP VPN Architecture</ref><ref>RFC 2918, E. Chen (September 2000)</ref> as opposed to BGP/MPLS techniques, requires no modification to existing routing protocols such as BGP. By the provisioning of logically independent routing domains, the customer operating a VPN is completely responsible for the address space. In the various MPLS tunnels, the different PPVPNs are disambiguated by their label, but do not need routing distinguishers.

Unencrypted tunnels

Template:Main Some virtual networks may not use encryption to protect the privacy of data. While VPNs often provide security, an unencrypted overlay network does not neatly fit within the secure or trusted categorization. For example, a tunnel set up between two hosts that used Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) would in fact be a virtual private network, but neither secure nor trusted.

Native plaintext tunneling protocols include Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) when it is set up without IPsec and Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) or Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption (MPPE).

Trusted delivery networks

Trusted VPNs do not use cryptographic tunneling, and instead rely on the security of a single provider's network to protect the traffic.<ref>Template:Cite book </ref>

From the security standpoint, VPNs either trust the underlying delivery network, or must enforce security with mechanisms in the VPN itself. Unless the trusted delivery network runs among physically secure sites only, both trusted and secure models need an authentication mechanism for users to gain access to the VPN.

VPNs in mobile environments

Template:Main Mobile VPNs are used in a setting where an endpoint of the VPN is not fixed to a single IP address, but instead roams across various networks such as data networks from cellular carriers or between multiple Wi-Fi access points.<ref name="Phifer">Phifer, Lisa. "Mobile VPN: Closing the Gap", SearchMobileComputing.com, July 16, 2006. </ref> Mobile VPNs have been widely used in public safety, where they give law enforcement officers access to mission-critical applications, such as computer-assisted dispatch and criminal databases, while they travel between different subnets of a mobile network.<ref>Willett, Andy. "Solving the Computing Challenges of Mobile Officers", www.officer.com, May, 2006. </ref> They are also used in field service management and by healthcare organizations,<ref name="Cheng">Cheng, Roger. "Lost Connections", The Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2007. </ref> among other industries.

Increasingly, mobile VPNs are being adopted by mobile professionals who need reliable connections.<ref name="Cheng"/> They are used for roaming seamlessly across networks and in and out of wireless coverage areas without losing application sessions or dropping the secure VPN session. A conventional VPN cannot survive such events because the network tunnel is disrupted, causing applications to disconnect, time out,<ref name="Phifer"/> or fail, or even cause the computing device itself to crash.<ref name="Cheng"/>

Instead of logically tying the endpoint of the network tunnel to the physical IP address, each tunnel is bound to a permanently associated IP address at the device. The mobile VPN software handles the necessary network authentication and maintains the network sessions in a manner transparent to the application and the user.<ref name="Phifer"/> The Host Identity Protocol (HIP), under study by the Internet Engineering Task Force, is designed to support mobility of hosts by separating the role of IP addresses for host identification from their locator functionality in an IP network. With HIP a mobile host maintains its logical connections established via the host identity identifier while associating with different IP addresses when roaming between access networks.

VPN on Routers

With the increasing use of VPNs, many have started deploying VPN connectivity on routers for additional security and encryption of data transmission by using various cryptographic techniques. Setting up VPN services on a router will allow any connected device(s) to use the VPN network while it is enabled. This also makes it easy to set up VPNs on devices that do not have native VPN clients such as Smart-TVs, Gaming Consoles etc. Provisioning VPN on the routers will also help in cost savings and network scalability.

Many router manufacturers like Cisco Linksys, Asus and Netgear supply their routers with built-in VPN clients. Since these routers do not support all the major VPN protocols, such as OpenVPN, many tend to flash their routers with alternative open source firmwares such as DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato which support multiple VPN protocols such as PPTP and OpenVPN.

Limitations:

Not every router is compatible with open source firmware which depends on the built-in flash memory and processor. Firmwares like DD-WRT require a minimum of 2 MiB flash memory and Broadcom chipsets. Setting up VPN services on a router requires a deeper knowledge of network security and careful installation. Minor misconfiguration of VPN connections can leave the network vulnerable. Performance will vary depending on the ISP and their reliability.

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Networking limitations

One major limitation of traditional VPNs is that they are point-to-point, and do not tend to support or connect broadcast domains. Therefore communication, software, and networking, which are based on layer 2 and broadcast packets, such as NetBIOS used in Windows networking, may not be fully supported or work exactly as they would on a real LAN. Variants on VPN, such as Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), and layer 2 tunneling protocols, are designed to overcome this limitation.

See also

References

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Further reading


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