Performance Analysis of Openvpn on a Consumer Grade Router

Performance Analysis of OpenVPN on a Consumer Grade Router

Performance Analysis of OpenVPN on a Consumer Grade Router

Michael Hall, mhall24@wustl.edu (A survey paper written under the guidance of Prof. Raj Jain) Download

Abstract:

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) offer an alternative solution using Internet Protocol (IP) tunnels to create secure, encrypted communication between geographically distant networks using a common shared medium such as the Internet. They use tunneling to establish end-to-end connectivity. OpenVPN is a cross-platform, secure, highly configurable VPN solution. Security in OpenVPN is handled by the OpenSSL cryptographic library which provides strong security over a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) using standard algorithms such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Blowfish, or Triple DES (3DES). The Linksys WRT54GL router is a consumer-grade router made by Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems, capable of running under Linux. The Linux-based DD-WRT open-source router firmware can run OpenVPN on the Linksys WRT54GL router. For this case study, the performance of OpenVPN is measured and analyzed using a 2k-p fractional factorial design for 5 minus 1 factors where k = 5 and p = 1. The results show that the throughput is mainly limited by the encryption cipher used, and that the round-trip time (RTT) is mostly dependent on the transport protocol selected. Keywords: Virtual Private Network, Performance Analysis, WRT54GL, DD-WRT, OpenVPN, OpenSSL, Experimental Design, Fractional Factorial Design

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 1.1 Background 1.2 The VPN 1.3 The Router 2. VPN Characteristics 2.1. Transport Protocol 2.2. Performance Metrics 2.3. System Parameters 3. Performance Analysis 3.1. Measurement Tools 3.2. Experimental Setup 3.3. Experimental Results 3.4. Future Work 4. Summary References List of Acronyms

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Performance Analysis of OpenVPN on a Consumer Grade Router

1 Introduction

In the past, enterprises have used...