The Importance of a VPN

Businesses need to share information across large distances securely. Whether you need to share information from the road, with your home office, or with multiple branches, the information you send across the internet is your business. Client records, payment details, internal documents; the success of your business depends on their contents remaining safe, secure, and easily accessible (to you).

Whether you’re a one person operation or a growing business, the best option available for information sharing across any distance is a VPN (Virtual Private Network). It is as easy and secure as sharing information between two computers on the same local network.

A VPN works by creating a tunnel between two routers. When you send information to a machine on the other end the first router encapsulates and encrypts your message, before passing it along to the other router which decrypts, de-encapsulates, and passes it to the destined computer. So anyone looking in can only see the two routers that the information is passing between without any location or content details. Usually when you send a message it is picked up by several different routers and passed along. A VPN forms an agreement between the two routers to send personalized encrypted information directly to each other which no middle men can understand.

BitFlip’s VPN

A VPN is so important to a business’s security but most off-the-shelf routers don’t come with the capability. Even when you can get VPN off the shelf, it’s usually marketed to large corporations and has a very steep price point. All of BitFlip’s routers come with the ability to form a VPN with another BitBox.

Off the shelf routers are difficult and time consuming to set up, requiring a specialist and adjustments to your network. BitFlip’s VPN’s are managed, which means we do all the difficult set up automatically and you can get straight to using it.

With all the variant VPN types available off the shelf, it can be difficult to get two routers that work together. They most often use the internet key exchange IKEv1 which has known weaknesses or OpenVPN. BitFlip use the VPN type, IKEv2, which is an improvement of IKEv1 that remedies many of those known pitfalls and allows us to pair our routers easily.

The encryption and key exchange we use in our VPNs is also a cut above the rest. We use AES-256 and AES-256-GCM (Galois/Counter Mode) with group 21 or curve25519 Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange with Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). These algorithms and hashes are the newest and hardest to break currently available. Unlike unmanaged routers, as stronger encryption and key exchanges become available we will seamlessly transition customers routers to the new highest standard.