The link is created by running pppd through a pseudo terminal that is created by pty-redir and connected to ssh. This is done with something similar to the following sequence of commands:

# /usr/sbin/pty-redir /usr/bin/ssh -t -e none -o 'Batchmode yes' -c blowfish -i /root/.ssh/identity.vpn -l joe > /tmp/vpn-device
# sleep 10

# /usr/sbin/pppd `cat /tmp/vpn-device`
# sleep 15

# /sbin/route add -net 172.16.0.0 gw vpn-internal.mycompany.com netmask 255.240.0.0
# /sbin/route add -net 192.168.0.0 gw vpn-internal.mycompany.com netmask 255.255.0.0

What this does is run ssh, redirecting the input and output to pppd. The options passed to ssh configure it to run without escape characters (-e), using the blowfish crypto algorithm (-c), using the identity file specified (-i), in terminal mode (-t), with the options 'Batchmode yes' (-o). The sleep commands are used to space out the executions of the commands so that each can complete their startup before the next is run.