OpenVPN: what is it?

In 2001, developer James Yonan was traveling in Central Asia when he needed to connect remotely to his corporate network. Forced to establish unencrypted connections via from servers located in countries with very questionable security practices, Yonan realized how vulnerable his data could be. His response was to create an open-source project, OpenVPN, to encrypt data and protect it from snoopers. If it’s not the first vpn protocolit is undoubtedly one of the most popular with wire guard.

How does OpenVPN work?

OpenVPN allows you to connect computers between them in a virtual private network. So even if the computers are far away from each other, in another office, in another country, on the other side of the world, it can connect the systems to each other securely through a secure encrypted tunnel. OpenVPN can create its tunnel using either the protocol TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) for maximum security, either the UDP protocol (User Datagram Protocol) for a speed raw, a flexibility that surpasses some competing protocols even today.

Communications are handled by SSL/TLS protocols (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security), the same technology used to protect websites over HTTPS. This is an advantage if you need OpenVPN to bypass a firewall or another geoblock, because once it’s set up, it’s hard to identify that you’re using a vpn. Your online activity just looks like normal web traffic. OpenVPN benefits from many SSL/TLS featureswhich allow him for example to confirm that you connect to a legitimate server, to create and share new keys of encryption to protect your data for this session, and to verify that your data has not been modified.

For most encryption tasks, OpenVPN relies on the extensive OpenSSL library, a powerful technology widely used by many web servers to manage their HTTPS connections. But OpenVPN also uses it to guarantee a compatibility with almost all encryption algorithms, hash functions or technologies of cryptography at public key : AESChacha20, Poly1305, Triple DESSM4, MD5SHA-2, SHA-3, BLAKE2, Whirlpool, RSADiffie-Hellman, Elliptic curve and more.