Virtual Private Network

Virtual private network technology is based on the concept of tunneling. Just like a water pipe contains the liquid flowing inside of it, a VPN tunnel insulates and encapsulates internet traffic—usually with some type of encryption—to create a private tunnel of data as it flows inside an unsecured network.

As your internet traffic flows inside the VPN tunnel, it provides a secure, private connection between your computer and a different computer or server at another site. When paired with strong encryption, tunneling makes it virtually impossible for your data to viewed or hacked by others.

How Does VPN Tunneling Work?

It helps to think of VPN tunneling as a two-fold process of data encapsulation and data encryption.

• Data encapsulation: Encapsulation is the process of wrapping an internet data packet inside of another packet. You can think of this as the outer tunnel structure, like putting a letter inside of an envelope for sending.
• Data encryption: However, just having a tunnel isn't enough. Encryption scrambles and locks the contents of the letter, i.e. your data, so that it can't be open and read by anyone except the intended receiver.

While a VPN tunnel can be created without encryption, VPN tunnels are not generally considered secure unless they're protected with some type of encryption. 

Several encryption protocols have been created specifically for use with VPN tunnels. The most common types of VPN encryption protocols include IPSec, PPTP,  OpenVPN etc.