Implementation of Pass through PPTP Relay System with Authentication at Each Gateway and Its Performance Evaluations

Abstract

The VPN (Virtual Private Network) technique becomes more and more popular to protect contents of messages and to achieve secure communication from incidents, such as tapping. However, it grow in usage that a VPN server is used on a sub-network in part of an office-wide network. But, a PPTP system included in Windows operating systems cannot establish nested VPN links. Moreover encrypted communication by VPN hides a user of the VPN connection. Consequently, any administrators of network systems can't find out the users of the VPN connection via firewall, moreover can't decide whether if the user is legal or not. In order to solve this problem, we developed a multi step PPTP relay system on a firewall. This system solves all the problems of our previously developed PPTP relay system(1). The new relay system improves security by encrypting through the whole end-to-end communication and abolishing of prior registration of passwords for the next step. Furthermore, transport speed is acceler ted, and the restriction of the number of steps on relay is also abolished. By these features the multi step PPTP relay system expands usability. © 2004, The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. All rights reserved.