Nowadays, a type of program that is widely used when surfing the net is VPN. They serve to encrypt the connection, hide the IP address and even avoid geo-blocking that may exist. We have many options available for desktop and mobile. Now, when did VPNs come about? Why did they appear? We are going to talk about it in this article, where we will review the initial history of this type of application and its use.
When did VPNs emerge?
VPNs, like any service we use on the Internet, have a history behind them and have undergone significant changes over time. But everything has a beginning and in this case we must go back to the early 1990s. The Internet was not yet very widespread, logically; It was hardly used in public bodies, companies and in certain countries.
Specifically, between 1992 and 1995, several companies began working to achieve IP layer encryption. The United States Navy was the first body to create this IP encryption through a system they called SIPP, which translated into Spanish can be called Simple Internet Protocol Plus. That was in 1992.
A year later, a team from Columbia University in collaboration with AT&T Bell Labs created what they called Software IP Encryption Protocol, better known as SwIPe. And this is precisely what is known as the first version of what would be a VPN today. The objective was the same as that achieved by the US Navy a year earlier, which basically consisted of encrypting the IP.
Fast forward another year, in 1994 Xu Wei, through a project sponsored by the White House, succeeded in creating the Internet Protocol Security Network, which is better known as IPSec. The goal was to provide secure and encrypted communication between two computers. Today it is still used. Already at that time they created the first commercial VPN.
Later, in 1996, a Microsoft team created the PPTP protocol, which is considered to be the oldest VPN protocol. This served all the other VPNs that came out.
increased need for security
It was from that date that the Internet really began to be popular among end consumers, both home users and companies. This made it necessary to have greater security and protect devices and network connections as much as possible. Antivirus and firewall were already quite developed, but a security bonus was needed to hide browsing.
That made VPNs begin to be more widely used after 1996. Of course, it was something new and expensive. They were only used by companies and not all, but only the most important or that could afford to make this type of investment. Nothing to do with today, where we can find both free and paid VPN applications.
It took considerably longer to reach the general public. In fact, it wasn’t until well into the first decade of the 21st century that we started to see VPNs for home users. Especially from 2010 was when there was an explosion in its use. More cyber attacks, more knowledge about what can happen on the network, more wireless connections…
In this way, today we are in a time when VPNs are widely used. Think, for example, of the need to use them to connect to public Wi-Fi networks where we can have security problems if an attacker manages to access that network. It is especially common to use a VPN for mobile.
