Discover how to securely access your home network when out and about, with Nick Peers
© GETTY IMAGES/MIHAILOMILOVANOVIC
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 backinto 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.