Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Share Post: Reddit Facebook
What is a VPN and how does it work? Your guide to internet privacy and security
#1
Quote:WHAT IS A VPN?
VPN is an acronym for Virtual Private Network. The purpose of a VPN is to provide you with security and privacy as you communicate over the internet.
Here's the problem with the internet: It's inherently insecure. When the internet was first designed, the priority was to be able to send packets (chunks of data) as reliably as possible. Networking across the country and the world was relatively new, and nodes often went down. Most of the internet's core protocols (methods of communicating) were designed to route around failure, rather than secure data.
The applications you're accustomed to using, whether email, web, messaging, Facebook, etc., are all built on top of that Internet Protocol (IP) core. While some standards have developed, not all internet apps are secure. Many still send their information without any security or privacy protection whatsoever.


HOW DOES A VPN WORK?
Let's start with the basic idea of internet communication. Suppose you're at your desk and you want to access a website like ZDNet. To do this, your computer initiates a request by sending some packets. If you're in an office, those packets often travel through switches and routers on your LAN before they are transferred to the public internet through a router.
Once on the public internet, those packets travel through a bunch of computers. A separate request is made to a series of name servers to translate the DNS name ZDNet.com to an IP address. That information is sent back to your browser, which then sends the request, again, through a bunch of computers on the public internet. Eventually, it reaches the ZDNet infrastructure, which also routes those packets, grabs a web page (which is a bunch of separate elements), and sends all that back to you.


WHAT ARE THE TWO MAIN TYPES OF VPNS?
Most of us are familiar with the concept of a LAN, a local area network. That's the private network inside of one physical location -- be it a home, a corporate building, or a campus. But many businesses don't run out of one location. They have branch offices, departments, and divisions that are geographically dispersed.
In many cases, each of these offices also has LANs. But how do the LANs connect? For some very specialized solutions, companies lease private lines to connect the offices. That can be very expensive. Instead, most companies opt to geographically connect separated private LANs over the public internet. To protect their data, they set up VPNs between offices, encrypting the data as it traverses the public internet.
Source
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  The best messaging apps for privacy and security in 2021 Sasha 0 1,161 01-14-2021 , 07:07 PM
Last Post: Sasha

Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)