What is the advantage and disadvantage of VPN over TOR

[Steven Susbauer]

On Dec 24, 2009, at 7:52 AM, Rashkae wrote:

> arshad wrote:
>> and how to configure a VPN in jaunty? (i don't have a VPN router, im
>> connecting to interent using mobilephone)
>> thank you very much.
>> 
>> 
> 
> Advantage: non-whatsoever
> 
> Disadvantage: You'll be routing your vpn traffic through routers
> controlled by other people, who include a handful of University computer
> science departments and even the NSA, who will all be given the first
> chance to sniff all your traffic for passwords and what not.

Tor goes through many more routers between the various Tor nodes and both Tor and VPN are encrypted. VPN is much more secure than Tor (all traffic is encrypted between the client and VPN), but is not generally used for web surfing, rather connections to a network to access devices on it. There are plenty of Fortune 500 companies that use VPNs, they would not be doing so if it was so easy for "University computer science departments and even the NSA" to sniff traffic and passwords. You're making a big assumption that University computer science departments and even the NSA don't run their own exit nodes, which would make it simple to sniff this traffic... not so much with an encrypted VPN into a private network.

To the OP, you might want to look at the purpose of a VPN. It is used for safely extending the network over the internet. You would configure a VPN on a mobile machine to connect to a home LAN to use its resources, for example (OpenVPN works well for this). If you do not have a network in place to VPN to, it's not going to be much use. Tor is not meant for security, only anonymization, though it provides encryption between entry and exit nodes. If you are worried about security and not anonymity, you're probably better off using the connection as it is, or setting up sshd on some wired machine and using it as an encrypted proxy (ssh -D).