Tunneling a VPN Within a VPN: Is It Possible?

[Steven Ellet]

TL;DR Summary

Layered VPN

Is it possible to put a vpn inside of another vpn, kind of like a tunnel in a tunnel? If so, how?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Why?

In principle data is data, and you can encrypt it as many times as you'd like. However, it doesn't add security, and whether someone has written a stack to do this is uncertain.

 

[Dr Transport]

This is the concept behind the Tor browser, not a vpn, but routing thru servers anonymously.

https://www.torproject.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

 

[Melbourne Guy]

You can use a global VPN working at the OS level in your PC, @Steven Ellet, then run a VPN app in your browser to achieve a layered VPN. I've occasionally done this inadvertently, and I doubt it increases my security much...but it does slow down my browsing!

There's no magic in the routing, you can set the two VPN end points differently and external parties will see two different IP addresses, depending on what they're able to see (browser traffic in LA, for example, non-browser traffic in NY, assuming those are the VPN end points you've set) it's just that the browser traffic will be forced to transit LA to reach NY, and thence to the service you are browsing.

 

[Vanadium 50]

You can certainly chain VPNs, but I don't think that is what the OP is asking about (hence my "Why?"). He is talking about nesting them. Now, maybe he meant chaining them, but until he says otherwise, we should probably assume he meant what he asked.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

You can certainly chain VPNs, but I don't think that is what the OP is asking about (hence my "Why?"). He is talking about nesting them. Now, maybe he meant chaining them, but until he says otherwise, we should probably assume he meant what he asked.

A VPN at the OS layer and a VPN in a browser is nested, @Vanadium 50.

The browser traffic - encrypted by the browser app VPN - is carried over the OS' underlying transport service, also encrypted. Maybe me picking two end points as an example suggests it is chained, but here's a visual of the nesting using Windscribe, both exiting at their LA Dogg site:

And within the browser, the VPN knows it is tunnelling with the 'double hop' notification:

Windscribe note that doing this "provides enhanced privacy and anonymity as it significantly reduces the chance of a correlation attack on one of our servers" but my tin foil hat is not that firmly attached that I bother with this double layer of security.