The 21st century has gone down in history as the age of digital technologies and global digitalization. With the development of digital technologies, boundaries are expanding, but this does not always apply to personal boundaries. That’s why users increasingly need to remain anonymous online. Tools like VPN, geo proxy (which you can buy at a good price on soax.com) and TOR help you stay anonymous and keep your data private.
We will tell you more about how they differ and what their features are.
Proxy
A proxy server is an intermediary server. This technology works as simply as it sounds. We will try to explain the principle of its work using the analogy. Imagine that your network traffic is a suitcase. You want to deliver this suitcase to a certain address, but you don’t want to do it yourself, revealing your location and name. So, you hire an intermediary who will deliver the suitcase to the right address without disclosing your identity and the real address. Simple and convenient.
Moreover, such intermediaries are quite multifunctional and are useful not only for trivial online privacy.
VPN
The principle of operation of a VPN is similar as a Proxy. Traffic first hits an intermediate server before it reaches the Internet. On the one hand, this allows you, for example, to access blocked resources. That’s because for the Internet provider, you send a request to a VPN server, not to the banned site. On the other hand, it allows you to remain anonymous because the site you’ve visited sees that the request came from the IP address of the VPN server, not yours.
The key difference between a VPN and a Proxy is end-to-end encryption. All traffic passing through the VPN server is protected through all its way from the entry point to an exit point. That’s because when VPN is enabled, an encrypted communication channel is created between your device and the VPN server, and it protects all your data from hacker attacks.
TOR
Tor stands for The Onion Router and it uses the so-called onion routing. Your data is the core of the onion, and its protection is the layers around it. Let’s take a closer look at what it means.
For anonymization Tor, like a proxy and a VPN, passes traffic through intermediate servers. But in this case there are three, not one server, and they are called nodes. Your traffic goes through three nodes:
- the input, or guard node;
- intermediate;
- the output node.
First of all, this is necessary to hide your IP address. Each node only knows the IP address of the node in the chain before. Therefore, by the time your traffic reaches the third node, the original IP will be lost. Second, your traffic is wrapped in three layers of security. That’s why the first and the second nodes do not see your traffic, they just peel the layers of protection like the skin of an onion, but only the third output node takes out the core and sends the request to the Internet.