Low Cost VPN Solutions?

Posted by Cliff on Monday January 3, 2005 @06:45AM from the your-net-over-the-internet dept.

whschwartz asks: "I'm looking for a low cost solution for allowing myself and a few others the ability to share a server at one of our locations. One thought was using SSH tunnels to establish secure connections, forwarding any ports needed by our apps. We'd want to be able to map network drives, control the server with something like PC Anywhere or VNC with the possibility of running apps that have remote data on the server. I use the Cisco VPN solution for work, but that's not in our price range and is probably overkill. Are there any other options I should be looking at other than using SSH port forwarding?"

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Re:OpenVPN by bloo9298 · 2005-01-03 16:35 · Score: 2, Insightful

Oh come on, you can't say there are problems with homegrown protocols without pointing people towards Peter Gutmann's comment on penis-shaped sound waves. :-)

I agree with you for the most part, but I think it is worth stating that using SSL/TLS or SSH does not free you from all problems. Secure (integrity not confidentiality) distribution of public keys is still a significant challenge (to be read as "something that's easy to screw up").