What is tunneling? | Tunneling in networking | Cloudflare

The Nugget

  • Tunneling in networking is a method of moving packets from one network to another by encapsulating them inside other packets. This process is crucial for establishing secure connections, enabling unsupported network protocols, and bypassing firewalls, commonly used in VPNs.

Make it stick

  • 🚇 Encapsulation: Wrapping packets inside other packets to transport data across networks.
  • 🛡️ VPN tunnel: A secure, encrypted connection over a public network, ensuring data security.
  • 🕵️ Split tunneling: Allows some traffic to bypass the VPN tunnel for simultaneous connections to public and private networks.
  • 🌐 GRE tunneling: Setting up direct connections across networks by encapsulating data packets using the GRE protocol.

Key insights

Types of Tunneling Protocols

  1. IP-in-IP:
    • Tunneling protocol for encapsulating IP packets inside other IP packets, used for setting up network routes.
  2. SSH Tunneling:
    • Secure Shell protocol for encrypted connections at the application layer.

How Cloudflare Uses Tunneling

  1. Magic Transit:
    • Cloudflare's solution to protect network infrastructure from DDoS attacks and threats.
    • Utilizes GRE tunneling to securely connect Cloudflare's network with the customer's internal network.

Other Tunneling Protocols

  1. Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP)
  2. Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP)
  3. Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP)
  4. Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN)

Key quotes

  • "Tunneling is a way to move packets from one network to another by wrapping a packet inside another packet."
  • "Imagine a company wants to set up a wide area network connecting two offices using different protocols; tunneling helps them accomplish this."
  • "Encryption and tunneling go hand in hand to ensure secure data transmission."
This summary contains AI-generated information and may have important inaccuracies or omissions.