Don’t forget security issues

The convenience of being able to access your PC remotely can be a great boost to productivity, but today the Internet is a dangerous place and you don’t want to open up your PC to just anybody.

Similarly, if you’re planning on using your work PC to call home or vice versa, your company’s IT department may have some serious words to say on the matter.

All the remote access programs and services we’ve reviewed in this group test use various levels of data encryption. This is to ensure that no user names or passwords travel across the Internet in plain text and, furthermore, to make sure that communications cannot be effectively intercepted.

Two commonly used encryption systems found in remote control software are Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

SSL is very commonly used on the Internet for secure communications. You’ve probably used it when accessing secure web pages in online shops.

URLs that start with ‘https’ rather than ‘http’ are using a combination of SSL and HTTP to protect your personal details as they are transmitted to the vendor. The protocol is endorsed by many credit card companies for ecommerce.

AES is a newer encryption standard and is used by the US Government for secure communications. The maximum-strength version of AES uses 256bit keys and is supported in this form by Log Me In Pro and PC Anywhere to provide industrial-strength security.

While your communications are unlikely to be intercepted, it’s still important to use passwords that would be difficult to guess. Mixtures of upper and lower-case letters and numbers should be used – memorable nonsense words can also be a good idea.

If your remote control package supports IP filtering, you can allow or disallow individual or ranges of IP addresses explicitly. For example, you could configure your home PC to accept connections only from your office and nowhere else on the Internet.

If you want to use remote access software at work, you’ll normally have to gain the permission of your IT department. Your connection to the outside world could be seen as a serious and perhaps disciplinary matter.

Rather than waiting for incoming communications, most Internet-based remote access solutions work by making outgoing connections to a server that brokers the incoming connection requests from the remote user.

Corporate firewalls are usually less strict about outgoing connections than incoming ones, so these remote access services can usually negotiate their way around your company’s defences.

Luckily, the software vendors are aware of this and some provide information specifically to help you gain permission from your IT manager. If enough people in your company need remote access, corporate versions of the packages are available that can be centrally administered by your IT department.

You can find more detailed security information for two of the packages reviewed here in the links below.

Resources:
GotomyPC
Log Me In Pro

This is part of a group test on remote access software. Other articles are:
Group Test: Remote PC Access Software
01 Communique I’m In Touch 5.10
3am Labs Log Me In Pro 2.30.523
Anyplace Control 2.12
Citrix Gotomypc 5.0
Laplink Everywhere 4
Symantec PC Anywhere 11.5
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