I’m taking an online class at university and they want me to connect to their VPN in order to work on projects from my personal computer. I’m hesitant to do so because I’m not sure if this means they could potentially see my activity/files/information. I haven’t really used VPNs before so I’m not sure how they work. I use separate browsers for my schoolwork and personal browsing, but it’s all on the same account on my laptop.
I do use the school wifi when I go there in person, but I don’t do any personal browsing there (besides using spotify or the like). Is there much of a difference between using the school’s wifi and connecting to their VPN? Is there any way I could disconnect or turn off the VPN when I’m not using it? Thanks in advance!
Is there much of a difference between using the school’s wifi and connecting to their VPN?
A VPN software may support split-tunneling which allows you to only use VPN for some subnets, but DNS may still be a problem since you may have to use the DNS servers of the school. And DNS might also be the biggest privacy concern anyway since most Web traffic are encrypted, but DNS traffic usually isn’t unless you use DNS over HTTPS or TLS.
Is there any way I could disconnect or turn off the VPN when I’m not using it?
AFAIK you can usually turn off or disable a tunnel in VPN software.
BTW if the school requires you to install a CA certificate then you should know that they can issue certificates for any website. This makes it important for you not to send any internet traffic via the school VPN, since they might use the CA cert to in fact decrypt the traffic.
I think DNS over TLS would only ensure that you are connecting to Google or Cloudfare’s DNS servers and not some malicious middle DNS server attempting to redirect people to false websites.
But in the end all packets still contain the unencrypted destination and source IP, so the school could still see where the data goes via dns reverse lookup but not what data is being setn.