What is a VPN?

VPN stands for “virtual private network“. What exactly is a VPN? How does a VPN work? What are the advantages of a VPN

How does a VPN work?

Traditional internet connection (without VPN) When you visit a website, your PC, tablet, or phone establishes a connection with the servers on which the respective website is saved. Once the connection to the server has been established and the website contents have been downloaded, the third-party server also gets information about your IP address. The IP address is a unique number that can be used to determine your place of residence and other private data. Note: The connection to the server is not always encrypted. This makes it possible for intelligence agencies, internet providers, or hackers to spy on your online activities.

Internet connection using a VPN

If you use a VPN to connect to the internet, there is no direct connection to the web server. Your PC, tablet, or phone first connects to a VPN server, which then redirects all data to the website server. The website operator therefore only sees the IP address of the VPN server. The identity of the VPN user remains hidden.

In addition to the anonymization, your internet connection is also encrypted. Intelligence agencies, internet service providers, and hackers therefore have no chance of spying on you. Providers such as ourselves use military encryption technologies that cannot be decrypted as per the current state of the art

What are the advantages of a VPN?

The biggest advantage of VPNs lies in the fact that you can use them to surf the internet anonymously and securely. Through the anonymization, VPNs protect you from receiving a written warning. Using a VPN is particularly advisable for users of file sharing and torrenting platforms. Just like the great Redtube scandal showed, one should always use a VPN when accessing erotic websites since this can quickly lead to a written warning, which can be very expensive

VPNs also offer additional benefits for streamers. For instance, a VPN makes it very easy for you to access the desired content e.g., if you are on holiday and would like to access U.K content.

How do I use a VPN?

Using a VPN is relatively easy, even for non-professionals. You first need to download and install the VPN software on your PC, tablet, or phone. The installation only takes a few clicks. After the installation, open the program and click on “Login”.Simply enter your supplied username and password The VPN then connects to the VPN server and you can surf securely and anonymously.

Should you use Carbon VPN?

Our security explained

OpenVPN is the most popular VPN protocol. It’s also regarded as the safest. We investigated it to make sure it’s really as safe as people claim.

Read on to find out more about what this protocol is, how OpenVPN works, and whether or not it’s safe to use.

What Is OpenVPN?
VPNs send data to and from the internet in virtual tunnels.

These digital tunnels both encapsulate your information, camouflaging it by wrapping it in layers of additional data, and encrypt it, translating it into a special code that only your intended destination can decipher. These two steps go a long way toward defending your data.

However, not all tunnels are the same. There are various ways to mask and encrypt online information. We call these protocols. Some protocols are better than others.

OpenVPN is widely regarded to be the gold standard in protocols. Developed in 2001, it’s open-source, meaning that anyone can access and modify its code. This has created a community of VPN protocol programmers and users who constantly test, update, and improve the protocol.

How Does OpenVPN Work?
To decide if OpenVPN is the right protocol for you to use with your VPN, it helps to understand how OpenVPN works. One of the wonderful things about OpenVPN is that it’s very versatile, so there isn’t one standard, cookie-cutter way that it operates.

The open-source community around OpenVPN is always trying out new features, getting rid of glitches, and generally enhancing the protocol, so how it works may change from month to month or year to year.

In addition, this protocol is relatively customizable, so you (or your VPN provider) may decide to adjust certain aspects and settings to better suit your preferences.

Generally speaking, however, OpenVPN provides tunneling through SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and its updated form, TLS (Transport Layer Security). It draws heavily from the OpenSSL library, which is an open-source archive of protocols and security tools.

SSL/TLS protocols are ways of sharing the keys to both encode and decode information that is sent between devices. This is the heart of encryption.

For extra safety, OpenVPN also includes TLS-auth, also called HMAC (Hash Message Authentication Code) packet authentication or an HMAC firewall. This is an extra step that helps confirm that only the right users and devices can encrypt and decrypt data.

In terms of the actual encryption features, OpenVPN supports a variety of ciphers, which are the ways of writing code.

OpenVPN standardly implements 256-bit encryption, which means that its keys (the elements that “unlock” encrypted messages) are composed of 256 0s and 1s, making them very difficult to guess or crack.

OpenVPN can also use other, even stronger ciphers, such as 3DES (triple data encryption standard), Blowfish, CAST-128, or AES (Advanced Encryption Standard).

The protocol also supports an additional encryption feature called Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). This approach creates a brand new key each time you go online, just in case someone tried to steal your key from one session and use it to decrypt your messages during a different one.

OpenVPN can also be used on both TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol). These are both methods of connecting devices and transmitting information online.

OpenVPN with TCP is more reliable, but UDP is faster. You can decide which makes more sense for your needs.

When it comes to network setup options, OpenVPN is very adaptable. As the protocol’s website explains, “cross-platform VPN Clients and our VPN Server solutions provide the flexibility to deploy site to site, site to cloud, cloud to cloud, users to cloud, and many other network configurations.”

You can also use third-party applications, scripts, and plugins to further enhance OpenVPN’s functionality. These all make the protocol even more accommodating and powerful.

Unlike some other protocols, which work best or even only on certain operating systems, OpenVPN is set up for Mac, Android, Windows, Linux, iOS, and other platforms. This makes it a good choice if you want to run your VPN service on many different devices.

OpenVPN is so multifaceted that to describe exactly how it works in detail could take days, but broadly speaking, it offers SSL/TLS tunneling, virtually any kind of encryption you’d like, TCP and UDP options, all sorts of network configurations, and third-party upgrades, all while running on just about any device.

These features help it operate optimally and stay on the cutting-edge of cybersecurity.

Is OpenVPN Safe?
In short: yes. OpenVPN is generally the most secure protocol you can find and comes highly recommended by our experts. Audits of the protocol’s security found only minor issues, which OpenVPN quickly resolved.

OpenVPN is even typically considered safe from spying by the NSA (United States National Security Agency), which has sophisticated methods and a large budget.

Furthermore, as an open-source protocol, OpenVPN is not owned and operated by a major corporation. In contrast, Microsoft developed and owns both PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling) and SSTP (Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol) protocols.