Difference between cisco and MS vpn client

[ncosmetic]

I can’t understand what is the real difference between cisco and Microsoft vpn clients. When you connect to PIX by MS vpn you call it L2TP but you use IPSEC and tunnel, when you connect by cisco vpn client you call it IPSEC but again IPSEC protocol and tunnel mode is used. So it seems to me that the same technology is used in both cases, the only difference is when you use MS you configure PIX by vpdn command, when you use cisco you do it by vpngroup command.

But what is real difference?

[cjacinto]

When you say you are connecting via the MS client and you are using vpdn command, you are actually using PPTP. PPTP uses RC4 based encryption, and with data encryption (ie MPPE), could only go 40 or 128 bit., it is a Microsoft initiated standard. IPSec on the other hand is ietf standard and could either do 56 and 168 bit encryption a bit higher. IPSec clients also has

much richer functioanality than PPTP, such mode config, split tunnel, and different modes of xauth.