Implementation and analysis of SSL based VPN for Symbian OS

The past few years there has been a steady rise in connection less datagram traffic over the internet, protocols such as SIP, RTP and many of the proprietary protocols used by online games and other communication programs are preferring UDP over TCP, because for these applications performance is more important than reliability. However there is no standard way of securing UDP traffic, engineers can use IPsec, or they can design their own protocols to secure their traffic over UDP. Both of which are however not very reusable solutions, so there was a need to secure UDP traffic easily. TLS/SSL has been a very successful solution for securing TCP traffic and something similar for UDP would be a very good solution, thus DTLS was proposed. DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) is in many was similar to TLS and uses many of the same concepts as in TLS, but at the same time maintains the characteristics of UDPo. VPN can be a very good application of UDP; UDP offers many benefits over TCP, such as low delay, less resource usage, better performance. But before UDP can be used, there was a need of a method to encrypt/decrypt each incoming and outgoing packet, existing VPN solutions implemented their own algorithms, but now with DTLS there is a standard way which can be used. In this thesis I examine how DTLS can be used to implement a VPN and how it performs on a mobile device with a mobile operating system, Symbian OS 9