VPN is an acronym for V irtual P rivate N etwork. A VPN provides an encrypted and secure connection "tunnel" path from a user's machine to its destination through the public Internet. Once the connection is established, you will be connected to the TVCC network through an encrypted tunnel. Passwords and other sensitive information will be securely transmitted over the Internet and into the TVCC network...Common Uses For Your VPN:

Security:

Everyone can use a little more security, VPN accounts with RapidVPN.com gives you exactly that. When you create a private virtual tunnel between your computer and ours, and surf the internet from there, your VPN account is giving you a layer of security you never had before.

Virtual Firewall:

How can a VPN prevent a direct attack on your computer? Attacks are often directed directly at your known IP address. With a VPN account your home computer IP will not be see, our VPN server IP will be. Luckily our VPN server is behind some of the best known hardware and engineers in the industry who monitor activity diligently and make sure the VPN server is protected.

Anonymous Surfing:

Our VPN accounts enable you to surf the Internet without anyone knowing your true IP. IP's are often tracked and traced in order forms, websites, and for malicious purposes. If you are off our VPN right, you will see below our Database that will show your IP's origin country. There are even more extensive databases for tracking IP and location that can be found at http://www.maxmind.com/app/lookup_city. These databases are for sale and allow website owners, or anyone to utilize them with scripts. The above is just a small example of the information they can extract from your IP. When you have a VPN account at RapidVPN.com your IP will look like this to the world: show USA flag and reliable IP.

Be American and European Anywhere:

If you travel overseas you know the problems that can be had when trying to order something over the Internet. There are many scripts on the market that will analyze where the order is being placed from. If you are a Expat (Ex-patriot) living in China for example, and you would like to order something from a Ecommerce site, many times it will be blocked and marked as suspicious activity. This usually means you have to call the credit card company again and again to let them know it's you and not fraudulent activity.

Hot Spot Users Preventing Password Sniffers:

Hot Spots can be found everywhere now, which is very convenient but also dangerous. Hot Spot hackers are on the rise, it's far too easy now for criminals to do. Using a VPN will prevent Hot Spot sniffing devices from viewing your logins, passwords and private data.

Skype Users Looking for better rate:

Skype is the fantastic! If you don't use it download it and try it today (skype.com) Everyone at RapidVPN.com uses Skype to communicate and if you are looking for the best VOIP provider, look no further. Here's a little known fact about Skype, they base your per minute charges on what IP you have. So if you have a American IP and you call a American phone number, you are making a domestic call. Our VPN service can literally pay for itself if you are doing enough overseas calls.

International Users Blocked by Government Control:

Americans living and surfing the Internet overseas are often frustrated by the controls of the governments where they reside. Saudi Arabia is a country with strict control on what web sites you can surf, and even if you can use a VOIP service provider. Having a VPN account will allow you to bypass the controls, We believe in freedom of speech, while some sites should obviously not be up, we feel that American law at this time is the most practical way of dealing with inappropriate content. Blocking of web sites like Youtube.com is (in our opinion) adjacent to burning of library books.

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PPTP vs L2TP

PPTP

The Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP), developed by Microsoft in conjunction with other technology companies, is the most widely supported VPN method among Windows clients. PPTP is an extension of the Internet standard Point-to-Point protocol (PPP), the link layer protocol used to transmit IP packets over serial links. PPTP uses the same types of authentication as PPP (PAP, SPAP, CHAP, MS-CHAP v.1/v.2 and EAP).

PPTP establishes the tunnel but does not provide encryption. PPTP encrypted using Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption (MPPE) protocol to create a secure VPN. PPTP has relatively low overhead, this making it faster than some other VPN methods.

Most old vulnerabilities in PPTP are fixed these days and you can combine it with EAP to enhance it to require certificates as well. One advantage of using PPTP is that there is no requirement for a certificate infrastructure. However EAP does use digital certificates for mutual authentication (both client and server) and higher security.

How works: A PPTP tunnel is instantiated by communication to the peer on TCP port 1723. This TCP connection is then used to initiate and manage as second GRE(generic routing encapsulation) tunnel to the same peer.

Port/rotocol: 1723 TCP and protocol GRE
User Authentication Protocol: EAP-TLS or MS-CHAP v2
Encryption method: MPPE (Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption)
Encryption Strength: MPPE 40-128 bit

L2TP

The Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) was developed in cooperation between Cisco and Microsoft to combine features of PPTP with those of Cisco's proprietary Layer 2 Forwarding (L2F) protocol.

L2TP (Layer Two Tunneling Protocol) supports non-TCP/IP clients and protocols (such as Frame Relay, ATM and SONET).

L2TP does not provide any encryption orconfidentiality by itself. It relies on an encryption protocol that it passes within the tunnel to provide privacy. Nowadays L2TP connections do not negotiate the use of PPP encryption through Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption (MPPE). Instead, encryption is provided through the use of the Internet Protocol security (IPSec) Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) header and trailer. It is also important to note that IPsec is more resource intensive than PPTP, hence the overhead with a L2TP solution is higher than PPTP.

Port: 1701 UDP
User Authentication Protocol: EAP-TLS or MS-CHAP v2
Encryption: IPSec
Encryption Strength: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, AES 192, AES 128, and 3DES encryption algorithms

L2TP vs PPTP

L2TP/IPSec and PPTP are similar in the following ways:

-provide a logical transport mechanism to send PPP payloads;
-provide tunneling or encapsulation so that PPP payloads based on any protocol can be sent across an IP network;
-rely on the PPP connection process to perform user authentication and protocol configuration.

Some facts about PPTP:

+ PPTP easy to deploy
+ PPTP use TCP, this reliable solution allow to retransmit lost packets
+ PPTP support
— PPTP less secure with MPPE(up to 128 bit)
— data encryption begins after the PPP connection process (and, therefore, PPP authentication) is completed
— PPTP connections require only user-level authentication through a PPP-based authentication protocol

Some facts about L2TP(over IPsec):

+ L2TP/IPSec data encryption begins before the PPP connection process
+ L2TP/IPSec connections use the AES(up to 256bit) or DESUup to three 56-bit keys)
+ L2TP/IPSec connections provide stronger authentication by requiring both computer-level authentication through certificates and user-level authentication through a PPP authentication protocol
+ L2TP use UDP. It is a faster, but less reliable, because it does not retransmit lost packets, is commonly used in real-time Internet communications
+ L2TP more "firewall friendly" than PPTP — a crucial advantage for an extranet protocol due to most firewalls do not support GRE
— L2TP require certificate infrastructure for issuing computer certificates

To summarize:

There's no clear winner, but PPTP is older, more light-weight, works in most cases and clients are readily pre-installed, giving it an advantage in normally being very easy to deploy and configure (without EAP). But for most of countries like UAE, Oman, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, Singapore, Lebanon PPTP blocked by ISP or government so they need L2TP or SSL VPN which will describe in next posts.