Security
PPTP has been the subject of many security analyses and serious security vulnerabilities have been found in the protocol. The known vulnerabilities relate to the underlying PPP authentication protocols used, the design of the MPPE protocol as well as the integration between MPPE and PPP authentication for session key establishment. PPTP is (as of Oct 2012) considered cryptographically broken and its use is no longer recommended by Microsoft.
A summary of these vulnerabilities is below:
- MSCHAP-v1 is fundamentally insecure. Tools exist to trivially extract the NT Password hashes from a captured MSCHAP-v1 exchange.
- When using MSCHAP-v1, MPPE uses the same RC4 session key for encryption in both directions of the communication flow. This can be cryptanalysed with standard methods by XORing the streams from each direction together.
- MSCHAP-v2 is vulnerable to dictionary attack on the captured challenge response packets. Tools exist to perform this process rapidly.
- In 2012 it was shown that brute-force attack on MSCHAP-v2 is equivalent to single DES key brute-force attack. Online service was presented, which is capable to restore MSCHAP-v2 passphrase's MD4 in 23 hours.
- MPPE uses RC4 stream cipher for encryption. There is no method for authentication of the ciphertext stream and therefore the ciphertext is vulnerable to a bit-flipping attack. An attacker could modify the stream in transit and adjust single bits to change the output stream without possibility of detection. These bit flips may be detected by the protocols themselves through checksums or other means.
EAP-TLS is seen as the superior authentication choice for PPTP; however, it requires implementation of a Public Key Infrastructure for both client and server certificates. As such it is not a viable authentication option for many remote access installations.
Read more about this topic: Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol
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