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DESIGN AND SIMULATION OF SECURE VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK (VPN) OVER AN OPEN NETWORK (INTERNET) INFRATRUCTURE (CASE STUDY OF NATIONAL BOARD FOR TECHNICAL EDUCATION NBTE)

ABSTRACT

The world has changed a lot in the last couple of decades. Instead of simply dealing with local or regional concerns, many businesses now have to think about global markets and logistics. Many companies have facilities spread out across the country or around the world, and there is one thing that all of them need, a way to maintain cost effective, fast, secure and reliable communications wherever their offices are. How do we ensure the safe passage of data across a shared infrastructure? The answer is to deploy a secured Virtual Private Network (VPN).

CHAPTER ONE

1.0 Introduction

This is the information age. We no longer have to commute physically from one place to another to complete a set of tasks or to gather pieces of information. Everything can be done virtually with a mouse click on an online host. In a way, everything we do in our daily lives is related in one way or another to information access. This has made information sharing almost mandatory and indispensable. These days, a customer can retrieve and compare products or services information promptly online, anytime, anywhere. For competitive reasons, organizations that provide this information have to make the information readily available online. 

In other words, the concept of a shared infrastructure is undisputedly important. A shared infrastructure is none other than a public network. At present, the biggest public network is the Internet, which has over 100,000 routes and is still growing rapidly. As more and more companies link up their corporate network to the Internet, we are faced with an inevitable issue—information security. Sharing information on a public network also implies giving access and visibility to everyone who wants to retrieve these data. What if the person who has the accessibility and visibility to the information decides to create havoc? Some of the general threat types that are posed by malicious hackers include eavesdropping, denial of service, unauthorized access, data manipulation, masquerade, session replay, and session hijacking.

VPNs are networks deployed on a public network infrastructure that utilize the same security, management, and quality of service policies that are applied in a private network. VPNs provide an alternative to building a private network for site-to-site communication over a public network or the Internet. Because they operate across a shared infrastructure (Internet) rather than a private network, companies can cost effectively extend the corporate WAN to telecommuters, mobile users, and remote offices as well as to new constituencies, such as customers, suppliers, and business partners.

1.1 Background of the Study

The National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) is a Commission that was established by Federal Government of Nigeria to oversee the affairs of technical Schools in Nigeria. Their offices are located in various states of the Federation. Their functions include accreditation of courses, monitoring of the affairs of technical institutions in Nigeria. They do not have any secure and reliable communications infrastructure that connects their offices across the country. WANs connect customer sites via dedicated point-to-point links. This means that multiple independent circuits have to terminate at the corporate network egress, making the deployment non-scalable and difficult to maintain. 

VPNs extend the classic WAN by replacing the physical point-to-point links with logical point-to-point links sharing a common infrastructure, allowing all the traffic to be aggregated into a single physical connection. This scenario results in potential bandwidth and cost savings at the network egress. Because customers no longer need to maintain a private network, and because a VPN itself is cheaper to own and offers significant cost savings over private WANs, operation costs are reduced. VPNs provide an alternative WAN infrastructure that can replace or augment commercial private networks that use leased-line or frame relay/ATM networks. There are two ways business customers can implement and manage their VPNs. They can either roll out their own VPNs and manage them internally, or outsource the VPN management to their service providers for a total VPN package that is tailored to their particular business needs. Last but not least, from the service providers’ perspective, VPNs are a fundamental building block in delivering new value-added services that benefit their business customers as well as themselves. In this instance, the service providers deploy the VPNs for their customers, and the customers need only subscribe to the service providers for the VPN services.

1.2 Objectives of the study:

Secure VPN is the cost effective means to achieve the following.

• Access Control into a Private Network in a shared network

• Secure information and Identity Management

• Secure Intranet and information sharing

• Reliability

• Near 99% Network up Time.

• Secure Desktop Sharing

1.3 Significance of the study:

This project enlightens readers and would serve as bedrock for computer network and information control in a computer Network environment. As for a well-designed VPN, the project has the following significance:

• Extends geographic Network connectivity 

• Improve security in Private Network 

• Reduce operational costs versus traditional WAN 

• Improve productivity 

• Simplify network topology  

• Provide broadband networking compatibility 

• Provide faster ROI (return on investment) than traditional WAN 

• The study would also be helpful to the students who are carrying out research on this topic or any related topic

And the following features are incorporate: 

• Security 

• Reliability 

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