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.
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 (private and public). Those keys are required by your VPN provider or server to decrypt the data at its destination, ensuring the data can’t be read as it travels to and from your devices.
Nate’s article in October 2023 focused on how you use a third-party VPN provider to transmit your data—encrypted at source— through its own servers to mask the origin of your traffic. Not only does this ensure your data remains secure, it also allows you to mask your location from both your internet provider and any websites you connect to.
A VPN server setup does the opposite by encrypting data traveling to and from your home network rather than the internet itself. This doesn’t simply protect your devices by encrypting the data being sent and received, it also acts as a barrier to anyone else trying to access your home network from outside your home. Unless they have your VPN setup and credentials to hand, there’s no way they can connect.
WS4W (WireGuard Server for Windows) makes setup easy.
CHOOSE YOUR PROTOCOL
There are multiple VPN encryption protocols out there, but there’s only one choice for us: WireGuard (www.wireguard.com). It’s the latest standard to emerge, and has become renowned for its performance and ease of use, as well as its rock-solid security.