Apple lost a lawsuit filed by VirnetX a few months ago, and in addition to paying almost 370 million dollars in damages, the company will have to launch iOS 6.1.4 to modify the functionality of the system VPN from iOS. Apple published today a document specifying that the VPN on Demand function will work differently on all terminals that have at least iOS 6.1 installed. More precisely, Apple is going to launch iOS 6.1.4 during this month and will modify the VPN function to not allow automatic connection except under certain conditions that you have specified below.
Due to a lawsuit by VirnetX, Apple will be changing the behavior of VPN On Demand for iOS devices using iOS 6.1 and later. Devices using iOS 6.1 and later with VPN On Demand configured to "Always" will behave as if they were configured with the "Establish if needed" option. The device will establish a VPN On Demand connection only if it is unable to resolve the DNS name of the host it is trying to reach. This change will be distributed in an update later this month.
If the name of a host can be resolved without a VPN connection, you may see one of the following behaviors:
- If the host is a web server that presents different content to internal and external users, the VPN On Demand connection will not be established and you will see the external content.
- If the host is a web or mail server that has a name that can be resolved externally but cannot be contacted externally, the VPN On Demand connection will not be established and you will not be able to connect to the server.
- If you are using a public DNS service that provides an alternative IP address for hosts that it cannot resolve, the VPN On Demand connection will not be established and you will not be able to connect to the server.
- If you are using a VPN configuration that includes wildcard entries (such as *.com) that match top-level domains that are publicly accessible, the VPN On Demand connection will not be established when you contact hosts in those domains
The change is made by Apple because the company does not want to license the technology from VirnetX, but probably until the release of iOS 7 it will find an intermediate solution to offer VPN On Demand without limitations to all users.
