VPN

networkingprivacy

Stands for: Virtual Private Network

An encrypted tunnel that carries your traffic as if you were on another network.

A Virtual Private Network wraps your connection so it appears to originate from the VPN's endpoint, used to reach private corporate resources or to shield traffic on untrusted networks. It moves trust rather than removing it: you are trusting the VPN operator instead of the local network.

A VPN builds an encrypted tunnel across an untrusted network so two endpoints behave as though they share a private one. The technology is sound and the trouble is almost always the security model it implies rather than the cryptography it uses.

The traditional remote-access design authenticates a user once and then places their device on a network segment, which quietly makes location the authorization decision. Anyone who gets through, with a phished credential or a stolen laptop, is inside with whatever reachability that segment offers, and lateral movement follows. That single property is what drove the zero trust reaction and what ZTNA products replace by brokering access per application instead.

Site-to-site VPNs are a different animal and remain entirely appropriate: connecting two networks that genuinely should be adjacent is the job IPsec was designed for. Worth separating from the consumer meaning of the word, where a VPN moves your traffic's apparent origin and shifts your trust from the local network to the provider, which is a real change and not the same as making you anonymous.

Also known as: vpn, virtual private network, tunnel

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