A VPN or Virtual Private Network is a network connection that enables you to create a secure connection over the public Internet to private networks at a remote location. With a VPN, all network traffic (data, voice, and video) goes through a secure virtual tunnel between the host device (client) and the VPN provider’s servers, and is encrypted. VPN technology uses a combination of features such as encryption, tunneling protocols, data encapsulation, and certified connections to provide you with a secure connection to private networks and to protect your identity.
VPN connections technically give you all the benefits of a Local Area Network (LAN), which is similar to that found in many offices but without requiring a hard-wired connection.
Early VPNs were often set up to give individual employees secure remote access to their company networks, hence the name "virtual private network". By connecting to the company’s network, an individual employee can access all the company’s resources and services as if the employee were inside the company.
Since then, VPNs have evolved to provide the same level of secure communication between any device on the internet. Today, using VPN is increasingly popular among consumers as a means to protect their privacy online, secure their browsing sessions, and get unrestricted access to content or websites that are otherwise blocked or censored.
VPNs differ by architecture, purpose of usage, and accessibility. Two basic types of accessibility are site-to-site VPN and remote access VPN.
Site-to-site VPNs are used in the corporate environment. A site-to-site VPN ensures the safe encrypted connection of two or more local area networks (LANs) of the same company or of different companies. It means two geographically separated offices are virtually bridged together into a single LAN and users can access data throughout this network.
Remote Access VPNs connect an individual computer to a private network. This type of VPN can be divided again into two groups:
Security is the main reason why corporations have used VPNs for years. There are increasingly simple methods to intercept data traveling to a network. WiFi spoofing and Firesheep are two easy ways to hack information. A useful analogy is that a firewall protects your data while on the computer and a VPN protects your data on the web. VPNs use advanced encryption protocols and secure tunneling techniques to encapsulate all online data transfers. Most savvy computer users wouldn't dream of connecting to the Internet without a firewall and up-to-date antivirus. Evolving security threats and ever increasing reliance on the Internet make a VPN an essential part of well-rounded security. Integrity checks ensure that no data is lost and that the connection has not been hijacked. Since all traffic is protected, this method is preferred to proxies.
A VPN masks your IP address, giving you much greater privacy for your online activities. Unshielded, this IP address – the unique address for each device on the internet – can be misused to reveal your identity, location, ISP, and even the specifics of your online activity.
When you use a VPN, your IP address is masked so you can surf the web anonymously. Thus, no one can find out where you connect from or what you do online.
Moreover, by exchanging your IP address with the VPN server’s IP address, you can virtually connect from a geographic location that is different from where you are physically located.
For instance, you may be sitting inside a coffee shop in Dubai, but by connecting to a remote VPN server, you can appear to connect to the Internet from another location (i.e. San Francisco or New York) which hosts the VPN server you’re connecting to.
This enables you to bypass regional internet restrictions and get access to content (i.e. YouTube, Facebook) or internet services (i.e. Skype, Gmail, Viber) that are otherwise restricted or censored in the location you are staying in.
VPN is a client-server technology that is made up of hardware and software components on both the client (user) side and the server side. As VPNs have progressed from a corporate tool into today's personal VPN, the installation requires no additional hardware on the user side other than the computer or device for accessing the internet.
Both inbound and outbound traffic is routed through VPN servers. Depending on the traffic direction, the data is encrypted and decrypted either on the client’s computer or on the VPN server. For example, let’s assume you want to watch video on YouTube. You search for the video on YouTube and play it. Since this is outbound traffic, this data is encrypted on your computer by the VPN client.
Encrypted commands are sent to the closest VPN server, which then forwards the encrypted commands through the network of the servers to the gateway server, where the command is decrypted and sent through the public internet to YouTube.
As the video is played, since it is inbound traffic, the process is repeated in reverse. The video stream goes to the VPN server where it gets encrypted, sent to the closest client server, and forwarded to the client where it is decrypted and played in the client’s internet browser. You, as the user (client), get the IP address of the VPN gateway server so it is difficult to track down your real IP address and pinpoint your geographical location.
In the pursuit of creating a virtual private network, with its combination of tunneling, encryption, and data encapsulation, security experts have created three different families of VPNs, each with their own specific characteristics: IPsec, PPTP, and SSL. There is no “one-size-fits-all” list of specs for a VPN. Computer experts primarily divide them by technical details and consumers distinguish them by ease of use and portability.
Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) uses a point-to-point protocol to make a direct connection between two nodes. It was the first VPN protocol to be supported by Microsoft Dial-up Networking and has been bundled into all releases of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95. The Microsoft connection has been an important part of PPTP's acceptance in the market.
While the PPTP protocol has the advantage of a pre-installed client base on Windows platforms, analysis by cryptography experts have identified several security issues such as its vulnerability to password guessing attacks.