VPN: The Anywhere Door To Virtual World
Yes, We are talking about Doraemon’s Anywhere door aka Dokodemo Door
With the increase of internet usage, security/privacy has become one of the vital concerns in this beautiful virtual world. One way to ensure privacy and safety is to use a VPN. Everyone must have seen advertisements of VPN providers whilst surfing on the internet and some of you might be using it on daily basis. Here in this article, we are going to have some information about VPNs. Let’s find out if Virtual Private Network: The Anywhere Door To Virtual World or not.
What is a VPN?
Virtual Private Network provides the users with a secured private channel to connect public internet. The main goal of a VPN is to keep your private information private. VPN is widely used at the industrial level to ensure extra security of their precious data as they cannot afford any potential threats hovering on the head. Some normal end users are using the VPN services to access the content that is not available in their region or for a better-secured way to interact with the public internet or hide activities from their ISP.
While using a VPN, a dedicated private tunnel is created from your device to the internet. Moreover, the data, transferred through this channel, is encrypted by one of the encryption algorithms. The only one, other than the client user, who can decrypt this data is the VPN server. Hence, if the data gets intercepted from the channel in between the transfer, it would not make any sense thanks to the encryption.
Types of VPN
Remote access VPN
As the name suggests, this type of VPN offers users to connect to a private network, such as an organization, from a remote location. Business people as well as normal users can utilize this type of VPN to fulfill their purposes. As mentioned earlier, normal users would utilize this to access blocked/unavailable content and business users would utilize this to access their organization’s data and services.
Site-to-Site VPN
This type of VPN is majorly used at the corporate level. It is also known as Router-to-Router VPN. If a company has multiple offices on different locations, they can use this type of VPN to connect different offices’ local networks for seamless communication and access whilst keeping the safety and privacy on point.
The safety and reliability of a VPN depend on the protocol used by the provider.
Types of the protocol used for VPN
PPTP
PPTP stands for point-to-point-tunneling. It is the oldest VPN protocol developed by Microsoft. It is one of the fastest protocols however the encryption standards are really low. Since it is developed by Microsoft, it is built-in into many computers. Coming to security, it is not much secured due to lower encryption standards. Moreover, many security vulnerabilities have been found in this protocol.
OpenVPN
As the name suggests, it is an open-source VPN which is used for providing Point-to-Point connections. Since OpenVPN is not a built-in computer and mobile devices, it is utilized by third-party VPN clients. Encryption algorithms like AES are supported by OpenVPN. It uses SSL (Secure Socket Layer) security protocol.
Internet Protocol Security (IPSec)
Generally, IPSec is combined with other VPN protocols such as L2TP (Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol) for encryption purposes. This protocol operates on the network layer. It is used for Site-to-Site type of VPNs. IPSec is generally fast and secured enough to be used.
Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP)
It is a tunneling protocol that is used in the combination with another security protocol such as IPSec. L2TP provides a tunnel to connect the two different endpoints whilst IPSec works on the security part by encryption and decryption. It does not have any major vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
It is advisable to use a VPN for companies in order to protect their data and maintain privacy. Normal users might argue that only HHTPS is more than enough for normal usage. And yes, that’s true however, whenever users are utilizing an unknown network such as public Wi-Fi, it is still vulnerable. Moreover, adding an extra layer of security is no harm.
There are many VPN providers out there in the market as of now. Some of them are providing services for free which can lure the naïve users. However, free service providers may not be reliable. They may sell your information to a third party. It is advisable to use a well-known VPN provider’s services which may cost you some bucks but it will ensure your privacy and fast speed.
