How strong is the encryption used in the UVM VPN service?
The UVM VPN service uses Triple DES (Data Encryption Standard) with a key length of 168 bits. Triple DES is considered to be a very strong encryption algorithm, and is currently immune to key space search attacks (the most common kind of attack against strong encryption) because of its key length. It also uses a technique called Cypher Block Chaining (CBC) in which each plaintext block is XORed with the previous cypher text block before encryption. This makes dictionary style attacks very difficult and increases the overall effectiveness of encryption.
