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Everybody Needs a VPN – It’s Easy With A Smartphone or Linux

ByBrainTrust

Virtual Private Networks (VPN) have been around since the evolution of the Internet. Historically, they were used to allow secure and private connections between employees and their place of employment, or to provide site-to-site connections between geographically separate company offices. Setting them up, required specialist networking skills, so they were usually set up by expert system administers.

Fortunately, things are much easier now and anybody should be able to install and use a VPN. In this article I will cover the reasons why you should do this and then walk you through the simple steps to get you connected to your favourite VPN provider. I will then give you an overview of what is happens in the connection process and what you should look out for when using it one on your devices.

This article assumes that you are using either a smartphone, or a PC running a current version of Linux using a Gnome desktop.

NOTE: The instructions for creating a VPN for Apple MacOS or Microsoft Windows are available on your VPN service provider’s website, if you choose to continue using these operating systems in the future.

Why You Need a VPN

With the surge in cybercrime and mass surveillance over the last years, it has now become a necessity for everyone to use a VPN on their smartphones and computing devices, to access critical online services. Here are the primary reasons:

  • To encrypt your connection to an online banking service to protect your financial transactions.
  • To encrypt your connection to the internet when using free insecure public WiFi services.
  • To encrypt your connection to the internet when using WiFi services from hotels, shops, internet cafes, etc. where the security of their servers is of unknown quality.
  • To protect your privacy when connecting to the Internet in countries where mass surveillance is a problem, such as Australia.

What Does a VPN Do For You?

If properly installed on your device or computer and active, it will send all of the Internet communication that normally enters, or exits your device, to a dedicated server in a secure location, via an encrypted “tunnel” over the public network.

The server that is connected to, then becomes the “device” that is actually communicating with the target online service, not your PC or smartphone.

Your VPN provider will give you a choice of the server which is used as the end point for the encrypted tunnel. The country that it is located in plays an important role in the success, or failure, of what you are trying to achieve, so I will elaborate on this later.

To make life even easier, you can install interfaces to many VPN servers located in many countries and switch easily between them from your desktop.

OpenVPN – Open Standards – Future Proof

There are a number of VPN standards, but the one we will use in this guide should be your preferred option.

Using open standards such as the ones used for OpenVPN, ensures that you will not be tied to a specific vendor, or have to subscribe to a specific service for which you have no control over their software development ethics.

How to Add a VPN Connection to iPhone or Android Phone

While you are able to manually able to set up an OpenVPN connection on your smartphone, I would recommend that, in this instance, that you use an app developed by OpenVPN Inc. This is a well supported application and is industrial strength and easy to use. The app is called OpenVPN Connect, and is available for free on the Apple store and the Google Play store.

Step 1

Install the OpenVPN Connect app on your smartphone.

Step 2

Log into your VPN service provider account and navigate to the OpenVPN connection settings under your account. There are only three pieces of information required to setup your OpenVPN connection. The USERNAME, PASSWORD and SERVER CONFIG. If you are following along with this guide using Proton VPN, you will see that the username and passord are not the ones you logged into your account with. The username and password are those used to authenticate with the VPN server that you will be using when you actually enable the VPN.

Step 3

Download and save the OpenVPN server configuration file. This file will normally have an “.ovpn” suffix. Make a note of the filename as you will use it in the next step.

Step 4

Open the OpenVPN Connect app and look for the downloaded configuration file and select add “import” when it has found the new connection profile.

Step 5

Once the new profile is entered, fill in the username and the save the password.

Step 6

Connect to the new VPN connection, either via the app, or via the general settings on your smartphone.

How to Add a VPN Connection To PC (Linux with Gnome)

The are many ways to setup your new VPN connection, however, I will describe only one. This method should work for most VPN providers that support OpenVPN connections. Furthermore, this method does not require you to install any customised software on your Linux system, as OpenVPN is installed by default on both Ubuntu and Fedora and both have the Gnome settings for automatically applying the appropriate passwords to your VPN account.

In my example, I will show you a typical manual installation of a Proton VPN service. This is available to anybody for free, when you create and account with Proton, so it’s a good starting point.

Step 1

Log into your VPN service provider account and navigate to the OpenVPN connection settings under your account. There are only three pieces of information required to setup your OpenVPN connection. The USERNAME, PASSWORD and SERVER CONFIG. If you are following along with this guide using Proton VPN, you will see that the username and passord are not the ones you logged into your account with. The username and password are those used to authenticate with the VPN server that you will be using when you actually enable the VPN.

Step 2

Download and save the OpenVPN server configuration file. This file will normally have an “.ovpn” suffix. Make a note of the filename as you will use it in the next step.

Step 3

Open a terminal and enter the following command. Your VPN provider will give you an configuration file, with the suffix “.ovpn”. In this example will will assume the filename was “us-node-vpnserver1.ovpn”

nmcli connection import type openvpn file us-node-vpnserver1.ovpn

Running this command will give you a new, fully configured, virtual network interface. When you open the “Settings” on your Gnome desktop, you should see a new entry under the VPN options. The screenshot show what it looks like with two such connections. You can repeat this process as often as you wish and have a choice multiple different VPN servers.

Step 4

On your new connection, click on the cog icon to open the connection settings and then select “Identity” to open up the following menu. Your screen should look similar to one below:

Step 5

Now all you have to do is to enter the “User name” and the “Password” which is provided by your VPN provider under your account for connection to their servers. For Proton VPN, both the user name and password are randomly generated characters, so you will need to copy and paste the values in from between the website and onto this configuration screen.

Once you have done this and hit “Apply”, your Gnome desktop application will automatically supply the OpenVPN application on your PC with the correct server credentials when you activate the VPN slider on the Settings menu.

Alternative Installation – Proton VPN App on Linux

If you have chosen to use the Proton VPN service, then there is significant speed benefits to be gained by using the custom Proton VPN app on your Linux system. I have tested this on Ubuntu and have found it to work flawlessly. Additionally, the premium subscription, offers VPN servers in countries all over the world. The Proton website gives good step-by-step instructions on how to set this up.

Using Your New Personal VPN

To help you understand what you are able to do using your new VPN, it is important to understand what is happening within the operating system when you “switch on a VPN connection”.

The act of choosing a specific VPN connection and switching it on, effectively routes all of the wide area network traffic that leaves and enters your device, via the new encrypted tunnel to the specified VPN server, before going to the target website.

This has the following consequences:

  • Your target website will behave as if you are physically located in the country that the VPN server resides.
  • All applications that attempt to connect to services on the wide area network will do so via this new VPN connection. This will almost certainly stop some applications for working as they have before.
  • Your “location services” will now indicate that you are living in the country where the VPN server resides, not your real location.
  • Your connection from your PC or smartphone is encrypted all of the way to the VPN server. This is necessary requirement for untrustworthy Internet connections such as the ones done via public WiFi access points, hotels, shops, cafes. This is also a requirement if you have confidential information on your device that is to remain confidential from your communications carrier or government.

What the VPN does not hide:

If you use Google services, Facebook or other similar apps or use apps that use your GPS location, you are likely to uncover your actual location to those services, despite accessing them through a VPN.

Important Shopping and Banking Considerations

To conduct and online transaction, you will most likely be using a credit card issued by a bank in a certain country. That bank is fully aware of what country you live in and will have a very good idea of where you are travelling and how far you can travel in a day. This means that if you make a purchase today without a VPN connection and live in Canada and then you switch on your VPN with a server located in Japan and make a purchase, you will very likely get your credit card locked! It will then be marked as a fraudulent transaction and you will have to deal with explaining the whole VPN story to your bank before you can use it again.

All banks have very comprehensive Artificial Intelligent (AI) powered fraud detection systems that can work out whether it is “likely” that you are able to be in two different places within the span of time between two different transactions.

There are two options available to overcome this problem.

  1. When making a purchase with your VPN enabled, make sure that it is one from a server in the same country that you are making the purchase.
  2. If you need to purchase something from another country and have chosen a VPN server in that country to complete your transaction, do not click on a payment button. Simply logout of your account with that retailer, change or disconnect your VPN connection to one which resides in your country and then log into your account again. Most online “shopping carts” on most websites will still have your intended purchases stored and you will then be able to then complete the financial transaction as normal. Since the connection to the bank is done from a valid IP address in your country, the bank will regard this as a transaction as being “likely” to be an authentic use of your credit card.

Increased Cybercrime Make VPNs Essential For Everybody

With trillions of dollars in personal loss yearly as a result of cybercrime, it should be your number one priority for 2024 to step up your online security. There is no excuse when companies such as Proton offer a VPN service for free and many others offer very low cost subscription services.

While this guide uses Proton VPN as an example, you should evaluate other companies and remember that glossly expensive advertising does not make them good. Look at the location of their VPN servers, speed and loading of their servers and most of all, their security standards and ethics when it comes to logging and data retention.

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