OIT VPN Services

OIT provides Virtual Private Network (VPN) Services. The most common reasons to use VPN services are:

• VPN provides a temporary campus network presence to the VPN client. This is useful if the VPN client is off-campus, and needs to obtain access to some service that is restricted to the campus network.

• It provides a temporary Princeton University IP address and DNS hostname to the VPN client. This is useful if the VPN client is attached the Internet outside the University network, and needs to obtain access to some service that is restricted to clients connecting from a Princeton University IP address or DNS hostname.

• VPN may provide some security for the data as it crosses part of the network. Traffic between a VPN client and a VPN server is normally encrypted; this is useful if that portion of the traffic must pass over an untrusted path (e.g. across the Internet, or over a wireless network).

  The traffic is not encrypted while it travels over the remainder of its path (e.g. between the VPN server and the device with which the VPN client ultimately communicates).

  Take note that the security provided by PPTP-based VPN service (the only kind presently offered by OIT) is poor. Because PPTP provides poor security against a determined attacker, OIT does not recommend customers treat OIT PPTP VPN Service as providing security services.

PPTP VPN Service

PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) was developed during the mid-1990s by a vendor consortium including Microsoft. PPTP is a framework that permits a wide variety of implementations; however, when people refer to PPTP, they invariably are referring to the version PPTP developed by Microsoft.

Historically, most VPNs have used Microsoft PPTP because Microsoft provides PPTP-based VPN client software for many versions of Windows, and because it was available before other VPN technologies. Apple also provides PPTP-based VPN client software for Mac OS X 10.2 and later.

OIT provides a Microsoft PPTP-based VPN service. For information, see OIT PPTP VPN Service.

IPSec VPN Service

IPSec is an Internet standards-based framework for adding security to IP, the Internet Protocol. Compared to PPTP-based VPNs, IPSec-based VPNs are much more complex, and are still "bleeding edge" technology in some ways; potentially they can provide more flexibility and much greater security.

While OIT does not provide IPSec-based VPN service at this time, we believe it is an important future direction, and may provide such a service in the future.