THE BENEFITS OF VPNs—Virtual Private Networks—are well-known, particularly when it comes to securing your connection to the internet. Nate Drake’s excellent feature in the October 2023 issue explains how that side of VPNs work, but another use for VPNs is to provide you with a secure means of going in the opposite direction. In other words, instead of tunneling your way out into the wider internet, we’re talking about tunneling back into your local network from outside.
Why do this? First, it enables you to access your network as if you were sat at home, giving you access to all your local network resources. But another use for VPNs is to provide you with an alternative—and even more secure—means of accessing your home server. Instead of exposing sensitive services like your self-hosted password manager to the internet through a domain name, for example, you keep them safely ‘offline’, accessible only through your VPN server.
The great news is that unlike using a VPN to access the outside world, there’s no cost involved, because you host the VPN server yourself. Turn the page to find out how to get it up and running with minimal effort.
LET’S BEGIN WITH A RECAP of how a VPN works, and why it’s necessary. Data is sent and received over the internet in ‘packets’. Not only are these tagged with identifiable information about your location, but unless they’re specifically encrypted by whichever service you’re using (such as an https website), then their contents can be clearly read by anyone who intercepts them.
To combat this, VPNs create what’s known as a ‘secure tunnel’ to hide your data. This is done by encapsulating every single packet of data within an outer layer that’s encrypted using a specific protocol using specially generated cryptographic keys
