Bridging local adapter and VPN adapter

[Scott 0]

Are there any performance or security issues in bridging local network adapter with VPN adapter?

 

[Support 249]

hi Scott

 

No - what are you trying to achieve ?

 

Regards

[Scott 0]

I can't reach my main PC via hostname when outside of my home network. Internally, I make connections fine. I've forwarded ports in router, etc. The only thing that works is bridging adapters. What else may I be missing, i.e. different internal IP address for adapters?

[Scott 0]

I've figured out my problem...I can't just forward traffic to my PC via hostname through the Torguard VPN.

 

However, I may be a bit concerned with your advise related to bridging adapters. According to another source, bridging may be a security risk or traffic may just be skipping the VPN connection altogether.

 

Below is the response I received when asking this same question to this source, in addition he provided me with multiple, possible solutions...

 

So there are one of two reasons that bridging your network adapters is working:

1. Your VPN Provider has no firewalls in place and you are being given a public IP address visible to the Internet. When you hit your VPN Provider IP with your dynamic DNS, traffic is getting passed through. This is highly unlikely though and is still a big security hole to leave open.

2. When you bridge the connections, it is probably destroying all the routing that is pushing your data to your VPN Provider, meaning even though your VPN Connection is active, most likely it isn't actually doing anything and all your traffic is going to the Internet as if you were not connected at all.

[Scott 0]

I just received another TorGuard invoice, though I've had no feedback for my last reply.

 

If your answer is still 'no' for my initial question, please provide details as to why you say it's okay to bridge adapters when the dev of Viscosity recommends not to.

 

[Support 249]

Hi Scott

 

Sorry for the delay..

 

Please follow this up in a support ticket - the guys there can help you out.

 

The issue may be that, if you bridge we will need to use TAP, most of our servers support tun only where you cannot use for bridging. TAP is much slower.

 

Regards

[Scott 0]

I discovered there was an option in my DDNS updater client to bind it to my local network adapter. Thereby, allowing my hostname to only have the updated IP of my ISP and allow connections.

 

I was more concerned with the advice from this staff that bridging adapters posed no security risk. After some research, and input from network professionals, seems the answer herein may not have been appropriate.