Working from a cafe
Nadia works from a cafe. She opens the company file server on the cafe's free Wi-Fi. Anyone else on that Wi-Fi might be able to read what she sends.
A VPN wraps her traffic in a locked tunnel. The cafe Wi-Fi only sees scrambled data.
Key words
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| VPN | virtual private network: a secure tunnel across the internet |
| Tunnel | a protected path that carries traffic through an unsafe link |
| Encryption | scrambling data so only the right people can read it |
| Network | computers joined together so they can share data |
| Protocol | a set of rules that computers follow to talk to each other |
| IP address | a number that identifies a device on a network |
| Certificate | a digital document that proves who owns a public key |
| Authentication | proving who you are, such as with a password or a key |
| Public key | the open part of a pair of keys, shared with others |
| Private key | the secret part of a pair of keys, never shared |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can explain what a VPN does for remote access and list what must be configured.
Starter
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Starter
3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
The role of a VPN
A VPN has two jobs in remote access.
First, it encrypts traffic between the user and the company network. Anyone who copies the data on the way sees only scrambled bytes.
Second, it masks the IP address. Websites and others see the address of the VPN server, not the user's own. This adds privacy.
Check: the role of a VPN
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Check: the role of a VPN
4 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.