VPN is short for Virtual Private Network, which to the normal person, as so many other Computer related acronyms, doesn’t really mean a thing. This article will explain the concept of VPN in normal terms for everyone to understand.
We start this with an example which we will use throughout this article. Think about normal telephone lines. If you want to call your friend you don’t know how many people are actually listening in. Don’t worry this is usually not too much the case, unless you are someone really paranoid and thinks there is a conspiracy about everything. Anyway, the call connects you to your friend however you know that the call is being connected through several switchboards. Especially if your friend lives in another city, it gets even more “hopped” if you call to another country.
Now think of an embassy for example that needs to communicate sensitive information via a phone line. For that they have little machines that scramble the signal in a certain sequence that only the other end knows. No one else can understand it unless you have the correct sequence to “decode” it. This process is called encryption.
Now we can apply the same concept to VPN. Think of it this way, you are in another country but need to access information on your servers in your office. Since you are somewhere else you actually have no physical access to your network and your corporate firewall obviously drops anything not allowed. Now since company documents are usually considered sensitive data, they will not be transmitted over the internet where the signal gets hopped everywhere and listening in is even more easy then on phone lines. So, to sum up our problem: we are physically outside of our “homebase”, we need to access documents at the “homebase” but these documents are sensitive and cannot be transmitted via email.

Here is the solution: use a VPN :). and here is a description of what it does and how it functions: A VPN establishes a “tunnel” to your homebase that is encrypted. To do that, you have to have a password that the home VPN server also knows. When you connect over the normal internet, you send a request with a password, the VPN server understands the request, compares the passwords and from then on encrypts everything going to you with that password. Now, please don’t get the idea that its basically a password prompt that anyone can check and try. Rather read the article on encryption HERE.

So its that simple a VPN gives you a VIRTUAL extension to a PRIVATE NETWORK. that is secure from outside people and data can be transmitted safely that way.

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

A really good post about running CIPE VPN on linux is here and in order to help you getting started in setting your own VPN up at work check Azio’s post

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