Development of websites for secure data communication trhough a virtual private network

Abstract

The use of virtual private network (VPN) has been very popular in network security in order to combat cyber crimes and network vulnerabilities. A virtual private network is essentially a combination of tunneling, encryption, authentication and access control used to carry traffic over the public Internet. For the case of site-to-site VPN, users in different fixed locations can establish secure connections with each other over public networks and access resources from another location. In remote-access VPN, individual users connect to a computer network in a remote location as if they are inherently connected to that network. In developing countries, although many organizations already use VPNs, many private companies, some government institutions and banks are about to use VPNs. Therefore, implementation of VPN between two websites is focused on this project. In this project, two websites have been developed on each of two servers. The two servers are configured using Apache HTTP Server, PHP and MySQL. Next, a site-to-site VPN is implemented between the two LANs using a pair of Huawei routers and personal computers. A remote access VPN is also implemented using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer security (TLS). Furthermore, this research evaluates the routing protocols namely RIPv2, OSPF and EIGRP along with its possible combinations that have been utilized in a hybrid network and VPN in a real time topology using GNS3 on the basis of some parameters- throughput, jitter, packet length and packet loss using Wireshark and Iperf. An intensive simulation process was conducted for each and combined protocols considering two different networks. Moreover, a meaningful comparison of the protocols based on the analysis of the simulation results is also shown in this report. It suggests the best option-either individual or combined routing protocols for different infrastructure of the networks. The results indicate that EIGRP performs better showing the average highest throughput (28 packet/sec) while average lowest throughput (16 packet/sec) is obtained for combined RIP-OSPF protocol. For jitter, the overall best value is captured for combined RIP-OSPF-EIGRP and OSPF-EIGRP protocols. However, maximum packet size is attained using RIP and OSPF protocols. For better QoS, the lowest value of packet loss is calculated for EIGRP is 2.66 while RIP-OSPF-EIGRP shows the maximum value of packet loss (9.0).