Encryption required for playing poker over a VPN?

[castlevania]

I'm on my way to set up a VPN-tunnel with a commercial company. One thing that surprised me was that their standard package doesn't include any encryption. Is that normal or are they unprofessional? I don't know exactly what the encryption does. Do I want encryption for playing poker over a VPN?

[kerowo]

I was under the impression that the P part of a VPN was the encryption so it's like built into the process.

[BiPolar_Nut]

The P is for Private, which refers to the network routing only, not encryption. VPN's typically are encrypted, but they do not need to be.

I would consider it unprofessional, but arguably may not be necessary. The VPN tunnel itself is what would be encrypted...meaning traffic leaving the computer running the VPN client would be encrypted to the VPN server, then decrypted and sent to the rest of the world. Right now, without a VPN, you are sending the same unencrypted data you'd be sending if you were running through an unencrypted VPN. The only difference is you are changing the route the data takes.

Instead of your data going from Home to ISP to Internet Router A to Internet Router B to Internet Router C blah blah blah, your traffic would go from Home to ISP to VPN server to VPN server's ISP to Internet router X to Internet Router Y to internet Router Z etc. On an encrypted VPN, the hops from your Home to the VPN server only would have an additional layer of encryption. The path the data takes from the VPN server to the final destination would remain "normal".

VPN encryption/non-encryption will not affect your https or other encrypted traffic. Meaning, your poker logins, paypal password, etc will still be encrypted the same as if you were connecting directly from home without a VPN.

[kerowo]

Yea, I know encryption doesn't have the Price Pfister Phunny name thing going on... [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

So your saying that the VPN is just playing routing tricks with your packets so you are going "directly" into your VPN server and that connection isn't neccesarily encrypted? I'm not familiar with non-work VPNs and all the ones I used had those RSA tokens, although I suppose those are for authentication and not key generation.

[BiPolar_Nut]

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So your saying that the VPN is just playing routing tricks with your packets so you are going "directly" into your VPN server and that connection isn't neccesarily encrypted?

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Yes. Although VPN's almost always do use some level of encryption, by definition they do not need to be encrypted to be called a VPN (although most are encrypted).

[cbloom]

There's some confusion in general on this board because VPN's are used for two pretty seperate things :

1. To route your network traffic into another domain or IP; this is useful for spoofing your origin, or for joining into a corporate network as if you were inside it.

2. To provide a secure link directly to the server over an insecure network.

Now of course to do #2 you would need encryption and firewalls and lots of other complicated stuff. To play poker safely all you need is #1, which is what I assume most people here are asking about.

[aflaba]

Awesome help! Thank you very much! I'll run unencrypted then. Just to confirm because I'd hate to mess something up:

If I play from USA via a VPN in Sweden on Party encryption doesn't do anything I need so I might as well run unencrypted. I'm 99.99% sure that that is what you said Freakin but I just want to make sure [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].

[aflaba]

To avoid confusion. I'm castlevania. The VPN guy asked me if I can run PPTP. I almost started crying because I have no idea what that is. Can I run PPTP (point-to-point-tunneling-protocol)?

[BiPolar_Nut]

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Can I run PPTP

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Yes. The built-in VPN client for windows can run PPTP.

[aflaba]

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Can I run PPTP

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Yes. The built-in VPN client for windows can run PPTP.

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Awesome. What I meant to ask was if there are any disadvantages to IPSEC. I think you implicitly answered that though (no disadvantages in my case). Thanks!