Feature "Enable VPN Service" vs Netgear Armour vs Bitdefender VPN
OK, I admit that I am new to Netgear Products and an amateur when it comes to VPN. As such, I rely on documentation (vendor or otherwise) to learn about features and capabilities. I am having a great deal of difficulty in understanding a feature called "VPN Service" on my newly acquired RAX120. Can someone either explain or direct me to an explanation of this feature and what it does. I am under the impression when enabled, it provides me a level of VPN protection for my home network of 40+ devices but I am not sure now, hence my question.
I have enabled OpenVPN on my mobile devices and assume I can connect to my home network, remotely through this VPN.
I suspect my OpenVPN link will not provide VPN protection when I am connected to a public network, again, I am not sure of what VPN capabilities Netgear provides through this feature.
I also have Netgear Armour installed and activated on my router. This product sounds like it will provide me protection on my network but is it as secure as a VPN (ie encryption, etc). Where can I read more about this product and what it does?
I also have Bitdefender installed on my mobile devices and it seeps to provide VPN services similar to OpenVPN and may not need Open VPN any longer.
So, where can I go to read about these products, their capabilities, and how they function..
Re: Feature "Enable VPN Service" vs Netgear Armour vs Bitdefender VPN
The VPN in your router allows you to tunnel your connection from a public place through our home internet. My understanding is that it has some basic encryption and security but not as strong as comercial services like bitdefender. It’s still more secure than not using it at all.
The biggest issue with the router VPN: A slow home internet may be a problem because whatever bandwidth you have available, it will be split in 2 (half for incoming stream from your phone to your home and the other half from your home to the target destination service). If you don’t have a really fast internet at home and someone is watching Netflix 4K… your VPN connection will suffer like hell.
Bitdefender VPN is a comercial service with stronger security and faster connection.
Regarding Armor, it’s only a traffic monitoring agent to block any try to access suspicious sites with malware content. You cannot know what other people in your home is browsing, but you get notification when Armor blocks a site and which device/computer requested it. I have it, and I usually get notifications when myself or someone at home taps on advertising from Facebook. The ads on Facebook are not blocked but most of the external sites associated to those ads are tagged as suspicious by Armor’s server.
Re: Feature "Enable VPN Service" vs Netgear Armour vs Bitdefender VPN
The VPN server is essentially a direct implementation of the open source OpenVPN service. The encryption is similar to what you will get from many commercial VPN services. If you have a good upload and download speed for your home network, then the VPN server is a great free solution to encrypt your traffic when on public hotspots, as well as when you want to access your IP cameras and your NAS while away from home.
PS, most public hotspots will do as much logging of your data as possible, especially in US, EU countries, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and other similar countries where English common law based systems get flipped on their head and take a guilty until proven innocent approach for web traffic. To minimize liability for any potential criminal activity, places offering public hotspots will log as much data about you as possible.
The only downside compared to commercial VPN solutions, is that you can only choose 1 port at a time to host the VPN server on. This means that if you are on a public hotspot and they are blocking a number of common ports used by VPN services, you will not be able to change it unless you have some kind of out of band management for your home network.
On the other hand, commercial VPN services will have servers hosting hundreds of instances of the VPN server software where it can retry on a number of different ports and try to find something that is not being blocked.
Netgear Armor is different from a VPN as it does nothing to encrypt your traffic or do any kind of tunneling to get around censorship r other issues. Instead Armor will immediately intercept DNS requests to malicious domains and their related IPs. It will also regularly scan devices on your LAN for known CVEs and alert you to security issues. While it can't do anything on its own to fix those CVEs, that info can help guide you in security policy. For example, suppose you need UPnP but you have an older insecure IOT device on your network that is hosting a telnet server with a fixed password that you cannot change (happened with a number of D-Link IP cameras), Armor will immediately warn you about it, and you can then use the service blocking and block telnet access to the device. The device will still be vulnerable but it will no longer be exploitable from outside of the LAN.
Bitdefender is simply one of many commercial VPNs. All of the major ones are pretty fast with similar encryption, which is a good thing, as typically when a company tries to go with a proprietary encryption, they tend to make many mistakes and rely on security through obscurity in the hopes that no one finds flaws in their closed source stuff.
What is most important for a commercial VPN is pricing for something that will offer good speeds, and not log traffic.
Bitdefender's VPN service offers all of the desireable commercial VPN features at a good price.
