VPN with iPhone

April 10th, 2009 Category: iPhone

I was not aware that the iPhone supports VPN’ing. Recently I’ve found the VPN menu within the iPhone menu. Going through the menu I was much more surprised that it also supports the proprietary Cisco VPN (IPSec).

All import VPN protocols are supported:

L2TP
PPTP
IPSec

I could not believe that it will be possible to connect my iPhone with a Cisco PIX (running with PIX IOS 7) so I’ve tried it.

New VPN profiles are generated under Settings, General, Network, VPN. Entering the IP of the VPN server, account name and group name is all what is needed in my case. Once the parameters have been entered the VPN connection can be activated under the Settings menu. Unbelievable it works!

Ping’ing through VPN is up and running. It’s not clear which kind of transport the iPhone is using, the tested Cisco PIX is configured to support all possible transport types:

IPSec without transparent tunneling
Transparent tunneling with IPSec over UDP (NAT/PAT)
Transparent tunneling with IPSec over TCP

Using the original Cisco VPN client it’s possible to configure the transport type. Since it’s not possible to edit transport type settings on the iPhone, VPN may not work depending on the VPN configuration of the Cisco PIX. I don’t think that the iPhone will try different transport types, but who knows…

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