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VPN clients for Android and iOS

Tunnel Constructor

Article from ADMIN 36/2016

By Sandro Lucifora

Smartphones and tablets using hotspots and mobile data connections are susceptible to spying. iOS and Android each supply a tunneled VPN connection out of the box. We take a look at their apps, as well as third-party apps to see if they offer more.

Data transmitted over the Internet needs protection. In particular, smartphones and tablets, which generally use hotspots and mobile data connections, are most at risk. To establish a secure tunnel connection, the mobile end device needs to have a VPN client to connect to a VPN server. In the research for this article, I needed to distinguish between clients that only allow connections to a single peer or a manufacturer-specific device and those that support open protocols and remote sites.

For the test, I set up the Microsoft VPN server in Windows Server 2012 R2 and an OpenVPN server in Ubuntu 14.04. I also established connections to a third-party server using the IPsec protocol. The test devices were an Apple iPad with the latest iOS 9 and a Samsung smartphone with Android 4.0.4, which at the time were the most widely used OSs between 18 and 24 months old.

Apple iOS

If you search for VPN clients in Apple's App Store, you are shown a long list. However, a closer look shows that almost all of them are for establishing a secure connection with a fixed server. This is used on the one hand for masking your own IP address when out and about and on the other for encrypting data transmission – at least up to the VPN server. However, I wasn't able to establish a connection to the corporate server using any of these apps. Other apps only allow a connection to remote sites of certain providers. For example, an IPsec connection using LANCOM myVPN requires VPN gateways from LANCOM, and Cisco AnyConnect requires a Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance. The selection of independent VPN clients is therefore limited in iOS.

As a reference, I first took a look at the native VPN client in iOS 9. It is located under Settings | General | VPN . In addition to PPTP, it supports IPsec, L2TP, and IKEv2. (However, PPTP was removed in iOS 10 for security reasons

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