What is a VPN tunnel?

This article attempts to describe what a VPN tunnel is in simple language and explains how VPN provides strong anonymous and privacy protection.

The operation performed by the VPN tunnel is called Data encapsulation. To understand what encapsulation is, let's make a simple analogy. If you are a political refugee living in another country, the secret of your place of residence is crucial to your personal safety. But what should you do if you need to contact key people in your country and cannot let them know where you are?

Good. Blank postcards are a feasible method. You write the information, recipient's address, and name on the back of the postcard, load the postcard into an envelope, and mail it to your trusted friends in your country. When your friend receives the email, he opens the envelope, fetches the postcard, and invests it in his local mailbox. The person who finally receives the postcard will not be able to know the real sender of the postcard, because the postmark above is local.

The act of placing postcards in an envelope with your own address is equivalent to encapsulation. When You encapsulate postcards on the internet, you create a virtual private network tunnel, or VPN tunnel. Although the technology is VPN, You do not actually encrypt the content in the envelope, so it is not confidential enough. No encryption. If the final receiver of a postcard is strong enough or he has a friend who works at the post office, he can still capture some information. In this example, the post office staff may have the opportunity to see the postmark on the envelope before your friends receive the email, which may leak your hiding place.

To get a higher level of anonymity and privacy, you need to encrypt the content on the postcard, and only you and your friends can decrypt it. Now, even if someone intercepts a letter, he can neither understand the content on the postcard nor know who the postcard is sent. After receiving the letter, your friend interprets the content in the postcard and forwards it to the recipient. In the context of the anonymous VPN service, your friend is the VPN service provider, and the final recipient is the website you are browsing. It should be noted that the messages sent from your friend to the receiver are not encrypted because the recipient has no key. Similarly, when using the VPN service, the information sent from the VPN Server to the target website is not encrypted, but this does not affect your anonymous purpose, because your IP address has been replaced with the address of the VPN Server.

In the process of communicating with your friends, it seems that there is a security tunnel between you two to protect the communication information. This is why it is called a virtual tunnel or a VPN tunnel.

Original address http://www.ivpn.net/knowledgebase/59/What-is-a-VPN-Tunnel.html