Buzz
Every week brings stories, news, and articles related to encryption, data leaks, snooping, or concerns about cybersecurity. Many emphasize the importance of enhancing security for internet connections, such as using VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) when on public Wi-Fi in cafes. However, detailed information is often scarce.
How can one accurately discern the differences between VPN and Proxy? Readers can find insights in the following section. If considering investing time and energy into bolstering security measures, ensure you've selected the right tool.
Fundamentally different, yet VPN and Proxy still share a common ground: both conceal user identities and mask their true internet location. However, the level of privacy, encryption, and other features that VPN and Proxy provide to users vary.
Proxies Hide Your IP Address
A proxy server acts as an intermediary in the flow of internet traffic, thus your online activities appear to originate from elsewhere.
Imagine you reside in New York and wish to access a geo-restricted website, limited only to residents of the UK. You could connect to a proxy server in the UK, then access the website; this is a common method of IP concealment seen with modern support tools. Your web browser traffic seems to stem from a remote computer.
Proxy suits low-level tasks, such as watching geo-restricted YouTube videos, bypassing simple content filters, or circumventing limited service IP restrictions.
For instance: In a family where multiple members play online games, each daily earns a reward in the game to vote for the game server on the ranking website. However, on the ranking website, each IP address can only vote once, regardless of the user's chosen name. With a proxy server, each person can log in, vote, and receive their game rewards because each person's web browser is assigned a different IP address.
However, proxies aren't the ideal choice for higher-level tasks. Proxies conceal user IP addresses and act as intermediaries in internet traffic flows.
Proxies don't encrypt the traffic between your computer and the proxy server, often failing to strip identifying information from your data transmission beyond exchanging IPs and lacking built-in privacy or security options.
Anyone can access data streams (your Internet Service Provider - ISP, government, etc.), potentially snooping on your traffic. Moreover, vulnerabilities like malicious Flash or JavaScript in web browsers can expose your true identity.
This renders proxy servers unsuitable for critical tasks such as preventing malicious WiFi hotspot controllers from stealing your data.
Finally, proxy server connections are configured on an application-by-application basis rather than the entire computer.
Configuring the entire computer to connect through a proxy is impractical - configuring web browsers, BitTorrent clients, or other proxy-compatible applications. This is handy if you only want to connect a single application to a proxy but not useful if you want to route all internet connections.
The two most popular proxy protocols are HTTP and SOCKS.
HTTP Proxies
Among the oldest proxy server types, HTTP proxies are designed for web-based traffic. Connecting to a proxy server through web browser configuration files (or using browser extensions if the browser doesn't support proxy) routes all your web traffic through a remote proxy.
When using an HTTP proxy to connect to any sensitive services, such as email or banking, it's essential to use a browser enabled with SSL and connect to an SSL-enabled website. This is because proxies do not encrypt any traffic.
SOCKS Proxies
The SOCKS proxy system is a useful extension of the HTTP proxy system within SOCKS. SOCKS proxies are indifferent to the types of traffic passing through them.
Whereas HTTP proxies can only handle web traffic, SOCKS servers will bypass any traffic, whether it's intended for web servers, FTP servers, or BitTorrent clients. In fact, if you want to ensure BitTorrent traffic, the advice is to use BTGuard, a Canadian anonymous SOCKS proxy service.
The downside of SOCKS proxies is their slower speed compared to HTTP proxies, and like HTTP, SOCKS doesn't provide encryption that you can apply to specific connections.
Choosing a Proxy
When it comes to selecting a proxy, people often think about the price, how much they have to pay. There are thousands of free proxies on the internet, but many of them are unreliable and may contain viruses or malware.
If you're looking for quality and secure proxies, you can find a bunch of free proxy servers at Proxy4Free - a well-established free proxy database.
The rapid increase in computers and mobile devices demands faster connections (both of which diminish the impact of encryption overhead), making proxies less favored by many users. Instead, they opt for superior VPN solutions.
VPN - Virtual Private Networks Encrypt Your Connections
Similar to proxies, VPN or Virtual Private Networks anonymize user identities and conceal their actual internet location.
VPNs are established at the operating system level, and VPN connections capture the entire network connections of the configured device. Unlike proxy servers, which simply act as intermediaries for a single application (such as a web browser or BitTorrent client), VPNs capture the traffic of all applications on the user's computer, from web browsers to online gaming to background-running Windows Update applications.
Moreover, this entire process is transmitted through an encrypted 'tunnel' between your computer and the remote network. This makes VPN connections the ideal solution for ensuring privacy or addressing security concerns when connecting to any network.
With VPN, both your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and anyone else can access the transmission process between your computer and the VPN server. For example, if you're traveling abroad and concerned about logging into financial websites, emails, or even securely connecting to your Home Network remotely, you can easily configure your laptop to use VPN.
Even if you're not traveling to rural Africa, you can still benefit from using VPN. With VPN activated, you never have to worry about security, safety, or security vulnerabilities when using Wi-Fi at coffee shops or free internet services at hotels.
While VPN is an excellent choice, the application also has certain limitations.
What you get in the entire encrypted connection, you have to pay for. Running a VPN requires good hardware, and thus, good VPN services are not free (although some providers, like TunnelBear, offer a free software package). With VPN services like StrongVPN and SurfEasy, you only have to pay a few USD per month to use the service.
Additionally, another cost associated with VPN is performance. Proxy servers simply relay your information. There's no bandwidth cost, and there's only minimal latency when you use them. In contrast, VPN servers 'digest' both processing power and bandwidth, hence the fee for using VPN. Better VPN protocols and better remote hardware.
Choosing a VPN is 'harder' than choosing a free proxy server. If you're in a hurry and want a reliable VPN service, advice for you is to use TunnelBear, OpenVPN, UltraVPN,...
Summing up, proxy is a great solution for anonymizing your identity and hiding your actual location when performing low-level tasks such as accessing geo-blocked websites. But if you're doing more advanced tasks (like protecting yourself from snooping), you have to resort to VPN.
There are many computer definitions you may not know about, besides VPN, Proxy... there's also the possibility of a firewall or Firewall. To distinguish these definitions from each other not only requires theory but also practical comparison between Firewall and Proxy Server or between Firewall and VPN, guys.
