The traffic enters the SOCKS proxy running on your local system and the SSH client forwards it through the SSH connection – this is known as SSH tunneling. Once you have, you can configure applications on your computer – such as your web browser – to use the SOCKS proxy. SSH also uses strong encryption, and you can set your SSH client to act as a SOCKS proxy. Generally, SSH is used to securely acquire and use a remote terminal session – but SSH has other uses. SSH, which stands for “secure shell,” isn’t designed solely for forwarding network traffic. To get started with your own VPN, see our guides to using OpenVPN on a Tomato router, installing OpenVPN on a DD-WRT router, or setting up a VPN on Debian Linux. You don’t have to configure each individual application. In other words, when you’ve set up a VPN connection, your operating system can route all network traffic through it from all applications (although this can vary from VPN to VPN, depending on how the VPN is configured). To the websites the employee accesses through the VPN, the web browsing traffic would appear to be coming from the VPN server.Ĭrucially, a VPN works more at the operating system level than the application level.

This provides protection when using public Wi-Fi networks and allows users to access geographically-restricted services – for example, the employee could bypass Internet censorship if they’re working from a country that censors the web. If all web browsing traffic is sent over the VPN, people between the VPN client and server can’t snoop on the web browsing traffic. Depending on the VPN, all the computer’s network traffic may be sent over the VPN – or only some of it may (generally, however, all network traffic goes through the VPN). The encryption provides a secure connection, which means the business’s competitors can’t snoop on the connection and see sensitive business information.

The VPN client communicates over the public Internet and sends the computer’s network traffic through the encrypted connection to the VPN server. Once an employee is connected, their computer appears to be part of the business’s private network – they can access file shares and other network resources as if they were actually on the physical network. Instead, the business can set up a VPN server and employees on the road can connect to the company’s VPN.

However, the business doesn’t want to expose their important resources to the public Internet. Some of the business’s employees may travel and frequently need to access these resources from the road. In a common VPN use case, a business may have a private network with file shares, networked printers, and other important things on it. VPN stands for “virtual private network,” – as its name indicates, it’s used for connecting to private networks over public networks, such as the Internet.

Private tunnel safe