VPN
VPNs (acronym of Virtual Private Network) are encrypted “tunnels” acting
like an intermediary between a client and a server, just like proxies, so that all
the Internet traffic passes through that encrypted tunnel, blocking anyone from
monitoring your connection.
Compared to a proxy, VPN ensure higher responsiveness; its architecture and
server geolocation allow to optimize Internet network requests. Furthermore,
you don’t need to reconfigure browser and tools to stay anonymous, because the
tunneling is generally provided for the entire system.
##VPN Types
We can find at least three types of VPN in the market:
1)Trusted VPN
2)Secure
VPN
3)Hybrid VPN
In this chapter, we will cover Secure VPNs, because the Trusted ones require
special agreements with ISPs and are not easily applicable to common cases –
they are almost exclusively designed for enterprise networks where information
delivery to recipients must always be guaranteed.
Hybrid VPNs, instead, are the combination of Trusted and Secure ones and,
since we are not going to cover the former, we will exclude the latter as well.
The quality of a VPN in terms of security is determined by the types of protocols
and the safety of the keys provided – in addition to the policies and the service
stability, Most commonly, a VPN alone doesn’t ensure security:
the popular VPN provider, iPredator
offered connectivity only via
PPTP protocol: this kind of protocol was already considered as not fully secure,
since dismissed by Microsoft (which invented and patented it), and now we are
almost certain that governmental spy services can crack it in short times.
This is
just one example of what we found out. Now we’re going to review each
protocol and sum up their features and quality.