Celebrating 20 years of TINA, Barracuda’s proprietary protocol

Barracuda has had an amazing journey over the last 20 years. Our adventure started in Los Gatos in 2003, and it’s taken us all around the world to companies of all sizes and types. In 2009 our adventures took us to Austria, where we encountered another group of adventurers calling themselves phion AG.

At the time, phion AG was its own exciting path. The company launched in 2000 as phion, and by 2007 it had established offices in several countries and added the AG to its name via an IPO at the Vienna Stock Exchange. Barracuda and phion AG were on similar journeys, so it just made sense for us to join forces.

One of the cool things that phion had done was work with a large customer who wanted to connect thousands of terminals securely while making the most of the connectivity that was available. Tony’s blog here gives us more detail:

“They wanted ethernet connections, but they also wanted to be able to failover to modem/landline if needed. And ideally, a 3G wireless modem to use as a last-resort failover connection.

… They also wanted a centralized control unit to remotely provision, manage, and configure the entire network of 2,500 firewalls, requiring no more than two full-time administrators.”

The solution to this challenge was built with several technical innovations and an eye toward the growing need for secure VPNs and SD-WANs. It’s a big story, but we’re only going to talk about one part of it, which is TINA.

TINA VPN Tunnel connecting two networks securely and privately through the internet

Transport-Independent Network Architecture, or TINA, is the proprietary Barracuda protocol that was developed to address the challenges brought into focus by this customer. TINA extends the IPsec protocol and delivers superior VPN connectivity, quality, and availability to endpoints. It is the primary protocol in Barracuda CloudGen Firewall VPN and SD-WAN connections.

Why not IPsec?

To better understand TINA we should begin by looking at IPsec. Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a set of communication protocols that establish secure communications over a network. IPsec has three primary protocols:

• Authentication Header (AH): Ensures that data is not tampered with while in transmission
• Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP): Ensures confidentiality through encryption
• Internet Key Exchange (IKE): Allows sender and receiver to establish mutual authentication

IPsec provides security for all traffic that passes through the network by operating at the network layer. It doesn’t interfere with applications or data in transit. IPsec VPNs aren’t bad, and they can always be used with Barracuda and TINA. IPsec is an open standard that is reliable and widely supported. It just doesn’t have the capabilities of an extended protocol like TINA.

Why TINA?

TINA has more intelligence and flexibility than IPsec because it includes more information in the data packet. TINA is a multi-transport protocol and can have up to 24 independent transports in each tunnel.

TINA VPN Tunnel with two independent transports connecting a branch office to headquarters

TINA offers a range of features and benefits when used throughout the enterprise:

• Secure VPN connections: TINA offers traffic optimization, compression, and direct-to-cloud routing. Advanced end-to-end encryption algorithms reduce the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.
• Dynamic mesh networking: Direct and flexible communication between different parts of the network reduces latency and improves overall network performance.
• Transport independence and NAT immunity: TINA seamlessly integrates with other transport protocols, so you can use TINA endpoints to establish a trusted connection and use another protocol between them. Network address translation (NAT) is fully supported 
• Improved availability: Users can configure multiple VPN tunnels with failover and load balancing capabilities. Traffic can be managed and rerouted in case of a failure or congestion in any part of the network.
• Scalability: TINA can support infrastructure and endpoint growth as needed.
• Intelligent routing: Different types of traffic can be assigned different priorities and transports.  For example, latency-sensitive traffic like VoIP can be prioritized and routed differently compared to other types of traffic.

TINA VPN tunnel with multiple transports prioritized by performance

There’s a lot more to TINA, but you probably get the idea. Each TINA tunnel is like a miniature SD-WAN.

TINA is better with Barracuda SecureEdge

SD-WAN and TINA were front-and-center when we launched our enterprise-grade SASE platform this year. Barracuda SecureEdge offers all the power of TINA in a simple drag-and-drop interface. You can literally establish TINA VPN tunnels with just a few steps. TINA has always been easier to configure and deploy than IPsec, but now it’s even more accessible through Barracuda SecureEdge.

TINA was developed in Innsbruck in 2003, the same year Barracuda was getting started in Los Gatos. Two great reasons to celebrate two great decades.