A log which incidentally is only visible to the university and not available publicly. NAT can translate the university computer’s private IP address into one that can be used publicly but this will only be relevant in tracing if a log of this is kept. But on the whole the protection offered is a lot more than can be offered by a firewall.Ī firewall may be able to hide the individual IP address of the computer making the connection from the university as there will undoubtedly be some form of Network Address Translation (NAT). So, if they used a VPN server in London as their VPN connection point, then the website in California will only see the IP address assigned to this VPN server.Ī VPN might not necessarily provide bullet proof protection in protecting against the destination website from finding out the real IP address of it’s users, as some VPNs can have issues with IP address leakage through DNS and WebRTC leaks. Making the same connection from the same computer but this time using a VPN, the only IP address the website in California will be able to determine is the address of the VPN server the user connected to. So, a user connecting from a university computer at Aston University in Birmingham, to a website hosted in California in the US will give away the IP address details of their university to the website in California, from where a simple reverse lookup can easily see a connection was made from the University of Aston in Birmingham. VPNs have options to protect the identity of the people using the VPN through various anonymizing services such as masking the real IP addresses with its own batch of IP addresses.įirewalls can’t do this as readily as VPNs the source IP address, that is the IP address of where the connection is being made from is easily determined at the destination.
Many VPNs use strong encryption standards to ensure the encrypted data cannot be decrypted by unauthorized parties.
Anyone eavesdropping on this communication between the VPN client software and the VPN server will not be able to see what information is being sent, as they will only see encrypted data.įirewalls don’t do this as they are only involved in controlling access, so any data that needs to travel securely out of the firewall must first be encrypted by some other means, as is the case when secure communications are made using HTTPS connections where data travels using TLS over a secure channel created between the website and the web server it’s connecting to. VPNs allow data to travel securely across an encrypted link from the VPN client software on the user’s device to the VPN server ( check out my latest list of VPNs). VPNs protect data from snooping and eavesdropping What do VPNs do that firewalls cannot do? The main difference between VPNs and firewalls is VPNs provide privacy protection by ensuring connections cannot be snooped upon or tracked, and firewalls provide access control protection, limiting access only to allowed connections and blocking all other connections.īoth firewalls and VPNs have their merits based on the functionality they provide and in the rest of this article, I’m going to look at the differences between them and how they should be used to complement each other.
I wasn’t too sure at the time which one I needed or whether I needed both of them to be secure.
When I bought my laptop last year, I wanted to ensure I was secure and looked at getting a VPN or a firewall to provide protection.