Secure networking with VPN
Virtual private networks (VPNs) are becoming commonplace
as people increasingly use public IP networks ("the Internet") to
connect to their office network from remote locations. VPN technology solves the problem of communicating securely over insecure networks by encrypting (and authenticating) the traffic
exchanged between two hosts.
In recent years, wireless networks based on the IEEE 802.11b standard
also became an application for VPN technology. Due to the weaknesses in
the standard encryption method specified for IEEE 802.11b (WEP, "Wired
Equivalent Privacy"), a better method of encryption was needed. VPN
technology fills this gap by providing encryption at the network layer.
futureLAB has used 802.11b based networking since its establishment in
2000 and switched to a VPN infrastructure for the wireless clients
as soon as the weaknesses in WEP became public. We are using an IPsec
based VPN with certificate based authentication (X.509) in a rather heterogeneous environment, resulting in considerable experience with various IPsec implementations such as those from FreeS/WAN, PGPnet, Windows 2000/XP, MacOS X/FreeBSD (KAME, racoon) and OpenBSD.
Feel free to contact us with your specific questions about the setup of an IPsec based VPN. Whenever possible, we use Open Source software for implementing a VPN solution, which means that usually no license fees apply.
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