RDP or VPN?

[GraemeT]

I want to remote desktop to my laptop on my home network from my Windows Phone. It's just for a bit of fun really. I don't know much about this but I stumbled across the Windows Phone Remote Desktop app. It seemed quite easy to set up, and I'm fortunate in that my Internet connection has a static IP address. I mentioned this to a few network savvy friends and they said I was mad to consider RDP. They said it was far too insecure. They said exposing a port would just get attention and my password would eventually be cracked through brute force. They suggested setting up a VPN to do the job. This seems far more complicated to me. Surely I can use RDP and set up MAC address filtering so that my router only accepts connections from my laptop and my phone. That would make it bomb proof, wouldn't it? Any of you got any thoughts on this? Thanks.

 

[EspHack]

that would work locally

 

[GraemeT]

Thanks EspHack. Could you expand a little? Do you mean MAC address filtering would work? What do you mean by locally? Sorry if I'm being dumb. Thanks for your reply.

 

[hprvez]

Mac filtering is like having to yell a password at your door each time you want it to open. Uncomfortable for you and not secure at all. Remote desktop is VERY secure, exposing a port is not a problem and you are not forced to use the default one. From outside of your lan it requires some additional configuration to your router/firewall or you can use team viewer instead. Anyway rdp and vpn are not two ways to achieve the same result, they could complement each other in certain scenarios and I don't think you'd benefit from using both

 

[EspHack]

what I mean is, if somebody connects to your network-wifi, using mac filtering to only accept your own devices will work in this scenario, for protection from external attacks you would need a firewall

as hprvez said, remote desk is incredibly secure, technically, they would have to hack microsoft's servers to gain access

 

[GraemeT]

Thanks for the replies so far. Greatly appreciated. To be honest, I don't know much about this stuff. I was told RDP wasn't that secure. Maybe I've been misinformed. I'm going to have a go at setting up remote desktop. I think I need to go and Google the topic as well. As I said, it's just a bit of fun really but it could become useful.

 

[jsooney]

VPN and RDP are not interchangeable, they work in conjunction with each other. You use VPN to connect to a network (that's why it's called Virtual Private Network), and then RDP to connect to a PC.

I agree with your friends, it's nuts to expose RDP to the internet. MAC addresses are part of the Ethernet protocol and only communicated over LAN connections, not over the internet, so you can't filter on that.

I noticed Denim improved VPN support, so maybe you can give it a try. If you can't get it to work I would just leave it, particularly if it's just for fun.

 

[jmshub]

^ Exactly.

I use VPN to get into my home network when I'm away, then use RDP to remote into computers on my network.

As jsooney said, you don't want your RDP session open to the entire world. That is just asking for trouble. MAC addresses never leave your current local subnet, so you can't filter by MAC through the internet, and even in cases like MAC address filtering for WiFi access, MAC address cloning is a trivial matter.

I have never tried to do VPN with my phone, but I did set up my own VPN server. It was mildly frustrating, but didn't get to the hair-pulling-out stage. I set it up on my router using OpenVPN built into dd-wrt (www.dd-wrt.com | Unleash Your Router). If you are just looking to tinker, look into that and see if your router supports this, it is a way to get into it without rolling out any extra hardware.

If your router isn't up to snuff but you have an old PC lying around, you can try re purposing it as a gateway device with a linux distro like pfsense - (https://pfsense.org/) , which has OpenVPN capabilities.

 

[jsooney]

RDP can be as secure as VPN if configured correctly.
How to Enable and Secure Remote Desktop on Windows

It can't be done without exposing your PC directly to the internet, something I wouldn't even consider.

 

[GraemeT]

Hi all. Thanks for your replies. You've taught me a bit more about this stuff. Appreciated. I think I'm going to give up on this, though. RDP over the Internet sounds too scary. I thought I'd hit gold when I discovered my ASUS router had a built in VPN server, but it turns out it only supports PPTP, which I read is legacy and so is unlikely to come to WP. I'll have to go away and find some other project to play with. Thanks again.

 

[mpgh]

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