It appears to be a pre-configured VPN client. It installs very easily.

There’s a little icon of two arrows at the bottom that changes color based on connection status. I have not been able to make a successful connection yet, though I image the arrows are green when you do.

There’s not direct way to configure the client itself. It appears most of the config data is stored in the registry.

   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google]

   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Autoupdate-GVPN]
   “UpdateURL”=”http://wifi.google.com/verscheck”
   “AppPath”=”C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Secure Access”
   “InstalledVersion”=”1.0.0.10″
   “AvailableVersion”=”1.0.0.0″
   “AvailableDescription”=”Google VPN Manager Update”
   “NextUpdate”=dword:43317d27

   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Secure Access]
   @=”C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Secure Access”

   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\SecureAccess]
   “VPN Name”=”vpn.google.com”
   “VPN Server”=”vpn.google.com”

Lets go down the list. Go to http://wifi.google.com/verscheck and you get… “Google!” Granted, this was a simple browser check but either I’m missing something(very possible) or the versioning system isn’t in place yet.

Skipping on down to the next interesting bit, we get to "NextUpdate"=dword:43317d27 The dword value is a Unix timestamp, but in the registry convert the word to Decimal and you get 1127316775, a proper timestamp. A quick visit to http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm shows the next update time for my installation is Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:32:55 GMT.

The last two bits of interesting info are the VPN Name and VPN Server. These are set to vpn.google.com. We’ll explore this more in a second. Presumably we can change this information to other VPN servers and establish secure connections, once we know the protocol the Google vpn client uses.

Lets look at the server. A quick DNS resolution points vpn.google.com to 66.28.250.23. This IP is located in south San Francisco, according to Geobytes.

Trying to surf to the address via normal http gets nothing. Trying https:// results in an error page, but surfing to https://vpn.google.com/getpass/ reveals an XML data sheet:

   < vpn>
   < auth>
   < server>66.28.250.23
   < user>4203986116
   < pass>kk10KhExtm88IegZz8Uh
   < /vpn>

The username and password are being generated dynamically every time the page is being requested. I’m not that good at determining how data has been encoded, so an area of exploration on this needs to be what the encryption method is.

It seems that the client is using MPPE 128-bit stateless compression.

Ok, so as I said earlier I have not initially been able to make a connection to the Google VPN. I can’t initially think of a reason why it would make a difference between a standard connection through a LAN or a wireless connection, but lets explore some possibilites.

When I try to connect, after about 30 seconds or so I get an error that says “Secure connection failed. (Error code: 0×8007028b)”. --User:Geuis

I'm glad to see it's not just me who's having problems (I'm behind a NAT). Of course then I tried to configure my own VPN server, and that doesn't work through the NAT either. Probably a port forwarding problem... Nandhp 18:58, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]