In practice, a VPN must fulfill a number of requirements:
- Unauthorized third parties must not be able to read the data (encryption)
- It should not be possible to manipulate the data (data integrity)
- Unambiguous identification of the sender of data (authentication)
- Simple key management
- Compatibility to VPN devices from a variety of manufacturers
VPN achieves these five major goals by applying the widely used IPsec standard.
