VPN history

[Rick Smith at Secure Computing]

At 12:29 PM 2/13/01, you wrote:
>Hello there,
>I need some information about the history of VPN, and
>I was wonder do you can provide such to me.

Okay, so what is a "VPN" for the purposes of this history? Presumably it's
something more than point to point link encryption.

If so, then the 'first' is probably the Private Line Interfaces put on the
old ARPANET in the '70s. It ran ARPANET host traffic through an NSA link
encryptor and then pasted the result into regular host-to-host messages for
normal handling by the network.

I suppose the 'next' thing was Blacker, and then SDNS, which ultimately
begat IPSEC. Somewhere in there we have the independent evolution of PC
things like PPTP. I'm not sure what the first commercial VPN product was,
but it might have been HannaH, which was based on SDNS.

For references and details, look at old NCSC and NISSC conference
proceedings. They've got papers on just about all of those things. The IEEE
Oakland Security and Privacy conference may have a few things, too.

Rick.
smith at securecomputing.com

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