I’ve read the difference between a VPN and a proxy is that VPN encrypts the data
No, we cannot.
Because that answer alone is probably unsatisfying, I guess I’ll expand.
VPNs generally operate at Layer 3 of the OSI model and provide a way to route traffic between two endpoints as if there was no intermediate router. Any IP protocol can travel across the VPN – TCP, UDP, ICMP, and even exotic ones. The VPN doesn’t care. It’s just moving data.
VPNs are not strictly required to encrypt the data, but in practice, they almost always do. (IPSec, for example, has the ability to set a NULL cipher.)
There is no requirement for applications to be aware of a VPN being involved. In fact, in many businesses, if you work at a remote site, your traffic may be going over a VPN without you knowing it – a site-to-site VPN.
Proxies, on the other hand, are a layer 7 (application layer) feature. The client must be proxy-aware (which is why tools like proxychains exists – to inject proxy support into apps that don’t otherwise have it). There are proxies that are reachable over TLS, so they would also offer encryption.
Proxies can also modify the traffic going through it as they are application-aware. This is used in caching proxies or reverse proxies.
Proxies also only support TCP traffic, so you cannot tunnel UDP, ICMP, or other protocols.
a Proxy is just a relay point, a VPN actually connects disparate networks and machines together, generally over public infrastructure/internet.
No. Big difference and they both accomplish different goals. In short:
- A VPN is a connection to a remote network and places you on that network.
- Your machine is still making the requests - only thing is you’re assuming a different IP address
- A Proxy is (usually) a host within the network (and not necessarily on the same subnet) that makes web requests on your behalf and usually has some type of decryption/inspection and web content filtering.
In essence; a VPN can place you in front of a proxy but a proxy can never act as a VPN.
While there are some similarities between VPNs and proxies, they are not the same thing.
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) creates a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet, allowing you to securely access the internet and protect your online privacy. VPNs can also be used to bypass censorship and geo-restrictions by allowing you to connect to a server in another location.
On the other hand, a proxy server acts as an intermediary between your device and the internet. It can be used to mask your IP address and location, and may also be used to bypass restrictions or filters on certain websites.
While both VPNs and proxies can be used to access content that is blocked or restricted in your country or region, VPNs provide stronger security and privacy protections because they encrypt all your internet traffic, while proxies only encrypt the traffic between your device and the proxy server. Additionally, VPNs offer other security features such as a kill switch and DNS leak protection that proxies do not provide.
You need to study things more in depth, learn networking, TCP/IP, OSI model, how http and TLS protocols work, etc
VPN is condom, proxy is 3P
Live0verflow recently made a pretty good video on this topic and the differences between the two https://youtu.be/32KKwgF67Ho
While these are all good points, one point of clarification is that clients do not need to be proxy aware. Explicit proxies are the configuration you are referring to, where you’ll need to configure the application (e.g. browser to route to the proxy). But transparent proxies also exist, and as long as the certificate they use is trusted (such as the corporate cert distributed via PKI), they can even do full TLS decryption without any configuration on the endpoint.
That’s a fair point, you’re right. I explicitly excluded them in my comparison because I don’t see them at all as similar to VPNs since transparent proxies are generally on the LAN.
Well now with cloud hosted transparent proxies, many run a client on the endpoint that uses an ssl tunnel directly to a cloud hosted data center, and will work remotely. Which is quite similar to a vpn if you think about it…