Virtual Private Networks: Technologies and Solutions (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

VPNs enable any enterprise to utilize the Internet as its own secure private network. In this book, two leading VPN implementers offer a start-to-finish, hands-on guide to constructing and operating secure VPNs. Going far beyond the theory found in most books, Ruixi Yuan and Tim Strayer present best practices for every aspect of VPN deployment, including tunneling, IPsec, authentication, public key infrastructure, and network/service management. Strayer and Yuan begin with a detailed overview of the fundamental concepts and architectures associated with enterprise VPNs, including site-to-site VPNs, remote access VPNs, and extranets. They compare all options for establishing VPN tunnels across the Internet, including PPTP, L2F, and L2TP. Next, they present in-depth coverage of implementing IPsec; establishing two-party or trusted third-party authentication; building a robust public key infrastructure; and managing access control. The book includes expert coverage of VPN gateway configuration, provisioning, and management; Windows and other VPN clients; and network/service management, including SLAs and network operations centers. Finally, the authors preview the future of VPNs, showing how they may be enhanced to provide greater quality of service and network intelligence. For all networking and IT professionals, security specialists, consultants, vendors, and service providers responsible for building or operating VPNs.

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) take advantage of the Internet's low-cost data communications capabilities by sending network traffic (internal network traffic, of the sort traditionally sent over private data links) through the public data cloud. The money savings, however, comes with the need to make sure that the potentially sensitive information is properly protected during its trip through open channels. Virtual Private Networks: Technologies and Solutions examines this engineering challenge in heavily researched and thickly referenced detail, providing network architects with tons of information about the problems that exist, the technologies that have been developed to solve those problems, and the products vendors offer to implement those technologies.

Authors Ruixi Yuan and Timothy Strayer take a scholarly approach: Each topic is introduced, and new terms described, as the functions of each piece in VPN systems are explained. Books and papers relevant to the topic are referenced frequently, along with standards documents, and the book uses pseudocode and mathematical expressions to explain encryption and authentication. If you study the book--along with the other publications-carefully, you'll be rewarded with a deep understanding of how to build a good VPN. --David Wall

Topics covered: The state of the art in virtual private networks (VPNs), with special coverage of tunneling (via PPTP, L2F, L2TP, IPsec, and MPLS), the IPsec protocol, authentication, public key infrastructure (PKI), gateways, and clients. VPNs for static links as well as for remote access solutions are covered.