QUESTION

When using SSL VPN?s, do email attachments travel through the encrypted tunnel

Asked by:   Kelly Allatt ? Select eduction


  Martin Ingram, Vice President of Product Management, AppSense

This is part of a bigger question: What is protected by an SSL VPN? The answer to which is that all application data is protected. There will be client software on your PC that intercepts network traffic and moves it into the VPN?s secure tunnel for the trip over the Internet. The VPN on your gateway then both decrypts it and moves the traffic back onto the network connection it came from. This means that, not only the web traffic that you might associate with SSL but, all application traffic is secured. Hence email and email attachments are protected.



  Udo Kerst, Senior Product Manager, Astaro

Some SSL-VPN technology vendors give full VPN tunnel capabilities to the user. All data traffic including email messages and their attachments will pass through the tunnel when travelling from the user to the protected environment. This type of SSL-VPN technology uses standard SSL mechanisms but encrypts the data by using strong algorithms like, for example, AES with up to 256 bit depth and key lengths up to 2048 bit. This ensures maximum encryption with the most flexible VPN methodology.