the secure:channel

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When I went on vacation recently, I was looking for a VPN solution that would be easily used from just about anywhere, and that was easy to install. I found the perfect solution in a product from 3SP Limited, a U.K. company.

A VPN is a virtual private network. In the most basic terms, it is a tool that makes a network that is accessible over a public network to be accessible as if you were on that private network. This is usually done by tunneling the traffic, securely, through the public network.

If you’re slightly familiar with Internet networking, you’ll know that TCP/IP stands for TCP over IP, indicating that Transmission Control Packets are encapsulated within the Internet Protocol to be routed over the Internet. This is similar to the way that a postal letter is encapsulated in an envelope. The postal service routes letters without looking inside the envelope, allowing confidential information to be passed, and this can be done over the Internet as well. To ensure privacy, the postal letters could be ecnrypted, and so can the data within the IP packets. This private route through the public network is often visualized to be a tunnel through the cloud that is the Internet.

There are many ways to implement the encryption required to establish the private tunnel, but SSL is one of the most recently popular ways to do it. Using the same public and private key encryption used by your Web browser to securely visit your bank’s web site, a secure tunnel can be established between two gateways, or between a host and a gateway. Since encryption technology must be available on both ends, SSL makes for an easy implementation since most computers already have SSL available. Combined with a JAVA application to implement the SSL technology, you end up with a rather platform independant solution. This is the solution offered by SSL-Explorer, provided by 3SP Limited.

This means that I don’t have to bring anything with me on my vacation. From a public terminal, I can use a virtual keyboard to enter password authentication (to fight anti-privacy keyloggers), and then establish a VPN from any JAVA enabled web browser with SSL. Other authentication mechanisms are available, and many organizations with road warriors may want to use digital keys. With the VPN established, I can access resources on my private network that are back at the office and even use the Web proxy on my private network to help ensure the security of any Web usage.

SSL-Explorer is easily installed on any Linux or Windows gateway, although I don’t know who would be using a Windows server as a gateway. It comes with an entire VPN solution, including the client for the roaming user. A two user license is complimentary, and additional licenses are available. The software has many advanced features that should meet the needs of the user of almost any other VPN product available.