Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol

The Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) is an obsolete method for implementing virtual private networks. PPTP has many well known security issues.

PPTP uses a TCP control channel and a Generic Routing Encapsulation tunnel to encapsulate PPP packets. Many modern VPNs use various forms of UDP for this same functionality.

The PPTP specification does not describe encryption or authentication features and relies on the Point-to-Point Protocol being tunneled to implement any and all security functionalities.

The PPTP implementation that ships with the Microsoft Windows product families implements various levels of authentication and encryption natively as standard features of the Windows PPTP stack. The intended use of this protocol is to provide security levels and remote access levels comparable with typical VPN products.

A specification for PPTP was published in July 1999 as RFC 2637 and was developed by a vendor consortium formed by Microsoft, Ascend Communications (today part of Nokia), 3Com, and others.

PPTP has not been proposed nor ratified as a standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

A PPTP tunnel is instantiated by communication to the peer on TCP port 1723. This TCP connection is then used to initiate and manage a GRE tunnel to the same peer. The PPTP GRE packet format is non standard, including a new acknowledgement number field replacing the typical routing field in the GRE header. However, as in a normal GRE connection, those modified GRE packets are directly encapsulated into IP packets, and seen as IP protocol number 47. The GRE tunnel is used to carry encapsulated PPP packets, allowing the tunnelling of any protocols that can be carried within PPP, including IP, NetBEUI and IPX.

The RFC specification allows authentication using any PPP authentication method. In the Microsoft implementation, the tunneled PPP traffic can be authenticated with PAP, CHAP, MS-CHAP v1/v2, Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), or PEAP-MS-CHAP v2.