I’m going to need an ELI5 because I have read several explanations online, and I still don’t fully understand what makes them different. Why would you want to use one over the other? Don’t they both just forward your internet traffic? How do they work, in general?
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The big difference is that VPNs encrypt all traffic between your computer and the VPN computer, while this is usually not the case with a proxy. The lack of encryption and decryption can make a proxy slightly faster, but obviously less secure if you’re tying to hide what you’re doing.
ELI5 version:
VPN - You write a note in code, pass it to your friend who then decodes it, and then gives the decoded note to your crush. Your crush doesn’t know it came from you, and if the teacher caught you passing the note to your fiend, they wouldn’t be able to tell what it was.
Proxy - You just pass a note to your friend, who then hands it to your crush. Your crush doesn’t know if came from you, but If the teacher catches you, they can read it. It’s faster than having to write in code and decode.
* with a slight hiccup since nearly all web traffic is sent over HTTPS now - this distinction was a lot more significant ten years ago.
You won’t know what’s in the note, but you can snoop enough to know which two people are passing the notes back and fourth. Https won’t save you from letting me know you keep getting on furries.com or catching you downloading copyrighted material. A VPN will.
A VPN may protect you. It depends if you trust the host. Even with a trusted VPN, however, dedicated snooping at the exit node may secretly reveal my deep love of furries.com - thank god that’s a secret though.
that’s fine because i don’t download copyrighted material. everything on furries.com is freely available.
But then, there would be no difference between an encrypted proxy and a VPN. But that’s not the case.
A VPN operates on the network layer (3) meanwhile a proxy works on the application layer (4) that sits on top of first.
This means that using a vpn will send all network traffic from all apps over it (if configured accordingly) meanwhile a proxy will only work for the http(s) traffic in a browser configured with it.
For most applications, you won’t be able to tell the difference.
In a technical sense, a consumer VPN service is really more of an encrypted proxy than anything else. It tries to obfuscate what network traffic and activity you’re actually participating in by both appearing as the endpoint for your connection, and the destination for the connection of the sites you visit and internet services you use.
A true VPN does more than that, allowing multiple computers that are not sharing a router to communicate with each other as if they are. For context, certain IP addresses are local-only, such as any IP starting with 192.168.x.x. This means that when you access the broader internet, your IP is different than the one used when you try to use your WiFi printer on your same network. They’re both your addresses, you have them at the same time, but one is really the address of your whole network while the other is the address of your computer in that network. Think “building street address” and “office number in that building”
For businesses and other organizations, a VPN is a useful way to allow users to connect using these local-only addresses without physically being connected to the network those local addresses are valid in. You don’t have to expose the printer to the Internet, you just need to expose the VPN service to the Internet, and then allow VPN users to connect to the network when they need to use the printer
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This isn’t quite the right analogy. The traffic between you and the VPN is quite visible, so it’s more like the windows on the vehicle you’re using are blacked out so that nobody can tell what’s inside while it’s moving between those two points.
Just to de-analogy this a bit for clarity… with a VPN you can see that there is traffic but not what that traffic is…
The confusing thing is that the world is now running SSL by default so even with a proxy that traffic is hidden to intermediaries… so the distinction means a lot less than it once did.
