Grab Your SOCKS

Most software VPN products use one of two methods for providing data security. Either they encrypt entire IP packets and "tunnel" them within plain packets, or they encrypt only the data portion of the packet and include clues for how to decrypt the data. Aventail VPN, however, takes a totally different approach: using SOCKS to provide both encryption and access control.

SOCKS, a security technology, uses circuit-level proxies to relay information between networks. All traffic destined for a remote ne twork must be transmitted to a SOCKS server via the SOCKS protocol. The server then establishes a proxy connection to th e requested resource and returns the data to the original requester. No traffic ever passes directly between the two networks.

One of the traditional disadvantages of SOCKS has been that every client that wanted to access the SOCKS server had to use specially modified applications (the term for modifying an application is known as "socksifying"). Companies like Aventail avoid the socksification requirement by creating a specialized Winsock as part of their AutoSOCKS client. The AutoSOCKS Winsock.dll works with any Winsock-compliant application, so software such as Web browsers or FTP clients can work without modification.

The latest version of SOCKS, version 5, includes a number of enhancements over previous renditions, such as support for multiple authentication, encryption, and message integrity functions, as well as support for UDP packets.