How does VPN work?
More and more companies implement policies for remote work. A method providing high security for remote access to your office network from any location worldwide is VPN tunnel.
VPN requires internet connection. To connect remotely to the office network and the office resources is needed to establish VPN connection, most often this is done by a small application called VPN client, which automatically or manually establish VPN connection to VPN server. Even the VPN connection drops, for example caused by a short internet connection interruption, the VPN client automatically restores the VPN connectivity when internet works again.
Another option is to have constant VPN connectivity between your both locations – office to office or home to office. In that case you don’t need VPN client installed on your computer.
VPN types
Host to network (remote access). Computer or laptop, located outside office premises, for example from home is connected to the office network and accessing the office IT resources like file server and documents.
Site to site VPN. Two or more offices, located far away on different physical addresses share one and the same office network and IT resources like file server and documents.
VPN connection security
VPN provides high level of confidentially – even if someone is attacking and sniffing your network, the attackers will see only encrypted traffic and will not be able to read (understand) the data.
The person who wants to establish VPN connection must perform „sender authentication“ – in that way unauthorized persons will not be able to access the VPN server.
VPN uses „message integrity” algorithms and detects when someone is trying to change the data packets structure and integrity (data tampering).
VPN protocols
- IPsec (Internet protocol Security) – uses encryption with encapsulating IP packets into IPsec packet. De-encapsulation is done at the end of the tunnel where the original IP packet is decrypted and routed to its final destination.
- SSL/TLS (Transport Layer Security) – it could establish tunnel for the whole network traffic or it could protect separate network connections. SSL VPN is often selected as appropriate solution when NAT Firewall makes troubles to IPsec protocol.
- MPPE (Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption)
- DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security)
- SSTP (Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol)
Which kind of organizations use widely VPN technologies
Banks, Health, Financial Services, big Corporations, all they use VPN technologies to provide their services.
Nowadays more and more small companies invent VPN as important technology which improves their security.