Virtual Private Network

The VPN is a technology that’s becoming more & more important as more people have started working from home (wfh).

VPN services are all about securing the connection between remote computers & corporate offices. Now VPN services are being used simply to protect data as it is sent through the internet.

So the overall idea of the VPN or Virtual Private Network is what happens is you take your data, you encrypt your data, you put your data to another encrypted tunnel and you send that data through the internet to the end point. So basically your data is protected twice going through the internet. So it’s put in the tunnel and its encrypted within that tunnel until it gets all the way out to the other side.

Why this is important is because people trying to do network sniffing attacks or MITM if they can get in the middle of the connection between your computer and the server you are trying to connect to even if they can see the data its encrypted so they don’t know what it is. The nice part with this VPN tunnel is they have self protection mechanisms so that if they see that they are being attacked they actually drop and they will retry to reconnect using a different route.

The purpose of VPN is to protect your data when it goes from point A to point B. So it is very important in the IT world.

So if you go home and you are sitting with an office provided laptop at home and you try to connect to your work network you would set up a VPN connection and from there you can connect to outlook, your shared files and folders etc.

That’s why people have been using VPN about 20-25 years now.

Now VPN services are becoming more important as more people are using laptops in non-protected environment. So you go and you use your laptop and use it at the café or some café in Kalimpong the problem is that when you are using a public network there may be hacker in that network that tries to sniff and grab your data, steal your sessions or cause all kinds of other problems. Now for average users, average users are becoming more & more concerned about the security of their internet connections.

When we are connecting to free WIFI, we use Facebook services, Google services; we use all kind of services. So if we don’t protect our network connection when we are using those services somebody could be on the wireless signal of that café and actually grab our usernames and passwords because they will be sent unencrypted over that network. So what personal VPN services do is they allow you to create a VPN tunnel to the service provider you are using and then you actually access the internet from their server that are on the secured network. Instead of you being at your wireless (Café) and directly connecting to the internet you create a tunnel from you to their servers and their server will then connect to the internet.

For instance, say you connect to their router and open the internet and go to www.rohanronychettri.blogspot.com, some may see the data from your computer to the router. (And that the problem)

So what the VPN service does is - say you are sitting in a café and they have their router and you have the internet connection.

Then you have the VPN server, so what happens is you create a tunnel through the internet to the VPN server all your data is encrypted. Now from their (VPN) servers users access the internet. Since their servers are secure, their networks are secure therefore you don’t have to worry about anybody sniffing your data.

So if you are using VPN and somebody on the same network and they try to look at the data that you are sending/receiving all he can see is the encrypted tunnel and he can’t do anything.

This is why the personal VPN services are so useful.

You can pay VPN for ₹300-₹500 and use paid VPNs.

So normally you download the VPN application, you install (Client) in your system and from there it will take over and allow you to use their VPN services.

So how much of data you are going to receive/send has to be taken into account when you buy VPN services (Say 500MB/GIG) because the VPN servers will send the encrypted data from the internet to your computer. So the bandwidth has to be considered an important part(MB/GB).So the main thing you have to understand is that you are pulling your data from the internet to their VPN servers and over to you.

1. You have to see the bandwidth
2. The quality of their connection and their servers.

So when you think about bandwidth, you think about downloads right. You see I have 40mbps connection. So in networking you have to worry about upload speeds, usually for example people have Down 10 and Up 5, so they can download 10mbps per seconds and upload 5mbps per seconds. Why this becomes important here is because these VPN servers are both downloading (When they get data from the internet for you) and uploading to you. So when it comes out from the VPN server its upload for them and download for you.

So you are adding extra data to fetch things from the internet while using VPNs.

So when you decide to buy a personal VPN service make sure to go with a reputed vendor. Reputed vendor is going to have high bandwidth servers so that they can upload all those data to you because as I said it has to go from the internet, down to their servers, up back to the internet and down to you. So you actually are adding an extra hop.

So just see how much you using and how good are their servers.

In VPN you will come about a couple of encryption protocols. So whenever you are talking about VPNs, VPNs uses two kind of protocols in order to protect your data.

Has a tunnel protocol which basically creates a tunnel so that you can send encrypted data through the tunnel.

So the encrypted data how it is encrypted is used generally one of three ways:

1.       PPTP-Point to point tunneling protocol
2.       IPSec-IP Security
3.       SSL-Secure Socket Layer

PPTP is the back in the order so it is not considered a secure VPN protocol.(The free once uses the PPTP).

Hacking professional should not use the PPTP.

IPSec is generally used in the enterprise environment. So for example IBM , they have their remote workers they will uses the IPSec as the encryption it works with their environment better. Considered more secure and stable.

So that you are going to use is the SSL encryption. Now a days SSL is being used as the encryption tunnel for the VPNs. Now the thing with SSL is that it is client less VPN. Client-less means(Normally while using VPN you need to install the client application and that client application then talks to the server, so you actually have to do the install process to make it work)So client less means you are using the VPN tunnel without installing the application.(Sounds cool & good)

Basically the SSL VPN tunnels (the encryption) only works in a client-less state for web browsers, basically Chrome and Firefox.

So you can actually create tunnel for the data being send/received in Chrome and Firefox but it’s only for data being send and received in Chrome and Firefox.

So if you have Microsoft outlook app the data won’t be encrypted, if you are using the FTP connections it won’t be encrypted, if you are doing any other networking protocols it won’t be encrypted. It will only be encrypted in the client-less state if you are using Chrome/Firefox and its set-up in the web browsers.

So a lot of times these companies will sell you most of these personal VPNs, they will sell you SSL encryption, you will still have to install a SSL VPN app on the device or computer in order to tunnel all the networking traffics If you want your web traffics, email traffics and other traffic tunneled using SSL VPN then actually you have to install the app.

Those are the three basic VPN encryption you' will normally see when you go to by the service.

Now another important thing is how much you trust you VPN Company?

You should find a secure provider because if someone is sniffing the data from their servers and the internet it will be serious for the user. For instance, say the connection between you and their VPN servers is well encrypted and tunneled but are you sure the connection between them and the internet is tunneled and encrypted too or secure/protected?

Never use the free VPN servers it can be owned by hacker groups and they can log and grab data.

Now you have to think before using that the VPN servers you are using is not doing that.