Eli5: How do VPNS work and why are they considered safe? Couldnt the network Im connecting to not just read out all my passwords etc.?
In: Technology
VPNs more or less allow you just get by your everyday shitty ip hacker and allows you to unlock region blocker content. It’s a bit safer, but its not gonna keep an entire government out.
They aren’t more safe than your current browser. Tom Scott has a great video made on it.
The only thing VPN’s are good for is to connect to region blocked content and to keep your data away from your ISP’s. Although the government would probably still somehow pay the companies to extract data if you were high on the hit list.
they could. Internet security is mostly build on trust. there are certain industry standards and principles that can be applied by services you use but they have to be applied and need stay in compliance to those rules.
typically the most comon rule is to use https sites instead of http. put also those secure protocols are ultimately govern by an institution.
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Rather than ask if the VPN is safe, ask yourself if the company running it is safe.
Basic attempts to lift data from the tunnel don’t work well these days thanks to browser security, but zero days exist that VPNs could easily redirect you to. So it’s all about trusting the company.
It depends.
A VPN is just a secure connection between two endpoints. The security of the connection is pretty damn invincible, to be honest, for any practical purpose. The identity of the endpoints is also guaranteed (i.e. someone else can’t just pretend to be either end of the connection, if you have it set up properly).
The problem lies in that one endpoint is YOU (and that can be a security risk in itself, as your network and computers also have to be secure) and the other endpoint is… who? Some random third-party provider that you don’t know? There’s the problem.
VPNs, however, can be used to connect YOU to YOUR WORKPLACE. Both endpoints are well-known, so the VPN is useful and secure. I VPN into my own servers remotely. I know both endpoints are secure, hence everything is good.
But using a commercial VPN provider, say to bypass geographical restrictions on media playing, or to torrent or whatever… there you are trusting that other endpoint to not snoop on you and to also pass on your traffic to/from the wider Internet without modifying/snooping it.
VPN is just a secure connection between two endpoints that trust each other. If that trust is misplaced, there’s nothing the VPN can do for you. When you use a VPN you just have a secure connection to the other end of the VPN. That’s all. Beyond that, whatever that endpoint, or the wider Internet, does with that information is beyond your control. All you can be assured of is that nobody snooped on your traffic between your endpoint, and the other endpoint.
P.S. A VPN encrypts all network traffic that is sent over it, and decrypts it at the other end. Effectively it “joins” the two networks together as if you had put a cable between them, even if they are thousands of miles apart, and does so in a manner that an eavesdropper couldn’t see what traffic was being sent or received. It’s pretty much identical to a secure website, in that respect, and even uses the same kinds of key-exchange, authentication (i.e. checking that the endpoints are who they say they are), encryption, etc. as a secure website. Some VPNs even operate over a secure website connection rather than directly over the Internet, too.
First of all, it’s worth mentioning that there are two primary uses for the VPN.
The first (and original) use is to connect to the remote network over an untrusted line (usually the Internet) so that nobody can peek into the transferred data. It can be used to connect remote company locations back to the head office servers or to allow staff to work remotely. In this case, both VPN endpoints trust each other so they only need to protect communication from the middlemen. VPN is designed to do so very well.
The second use that has been growing in popularity in recent years is the internet VPN services. They leverage the technology to protect you from being eavesdropped on by your local ISP and/or hide your location from the servers you are connecting to. It won’t protect you from the VPN service itself, but the modern web is largely using HTTPS to encrypt communication anyway, so the combination is safer than the sum of parts – VPN will not allow your local ISP to know what sites you visit, and HTTPS will not let the VPN service to read your passwords.
There are other solutions out there if you desire greater anonymity, the most widely known being TOR (The Onion Router) which uses sophisticated algorithms to bounce your packets around the globe before reaching the final destination so that no single link in the chain knows both the sender and the recipient of the connection. The downside is that the connection delays are unpredictable and bandwidth is generally quite limited, so it’s only suited to general web browsing, but not gaming or streaming.
VPNs aren’t really that safe. Sorry, but that’s just how it is.
And yes, they could gather all kinds of info on you. And they’d probably have to turn their records over if required by law.
There’s not much you or anyone can do to prevent it. It’s not privacy by design, but rather a promise of respecting your privacy.
If you’re looking for internet anonymity maybe go for TOR.
Even without a VPN, networks cannot read the data you send- as long as the connection to the website is “HTTPS” rather than “HTTP”.
Put really simply, when you connect to an HTTPS website, the first thing your browser and the websites server do is setup an encryption scheme. Together, they agree on an encryption key. All the data you send is encrypted so that no eavesdropper can listen in.
Here’s the really cool part. Even if the eavesdropper listens in as you decide the encryption key, they *still* won’t know what the encryption key is!
Math is involved. Some very clever math. Google “Diffie Helman Key Exchange” to learn more about how.
Normally, your internet service provider can see all the websites/servers you connect to (but not the content of what is being sent to/from those servers). Your ISP obviously knows your name and physical address so they can give you service. This means they can connect your real world identity to the websites you access (including the exact time you accessed them).
If you use a VPN, your ISP can only see that you are communicating with the VPN’s server; they can’t see the content of that traffic, so they can’t see which websites you are accessing through the VPN. If the VPN company is privacy conscious and doesn’t save logs (or doesn’t know who you are because you signed up anonymously) it is much harder for someone to tie your browsing activity to your real world identity.
This is even more advantageous if you are using a public Wi-Fi network, which could be actively trying to listen in on your communications.
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