Security Assessment and Evaluation of VPNs: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

The use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) has witnessed an outstanding rise as they aim to provide confidentiality and anonymity to communication. Despite this enormous and ubiquitous usage, VPNs come with various security, misconfiguration, and performance related issues thereby hindering the users to take maximum advantage of this revolutionary technology. To address this concern, VPN users must choose the most secure and perfect VPN solution for the smooth functioning of daily life activities. Generally, no clear set of directions is available for assisting a common VPN user thereby accentuating the need to develop an elucidated and coherent checklist that thoroughly helps in evaluating any VPN based on its security, performance, auditing, and management function. This research comprehensively surveys VPN technologies, its features, working principles, and compliance principles that evolved over the last two decades. Based on it, this research presents a new methodology in the form of a feature-enriched template to comprehensively analyze a VPN solution. Each VPN feature is given its score against the potential damage it may cause in case of failure and the probability of occurrence of that failure. In this way, the corporate sector and individual users can quantitatively and qualitatively grade available options while choosing a VPN and use it effectively.