Assessment Q&A

The RTH Signature VPN is a personal Virtual Private Network solution.  This VPN solution creates an encrypted tunnel between your remote location and your home, allowing all your internet traffic to be transparently routed through your home IP address.  

This differs from a typical commercial VPN service where you pay a subscription fee to route all your traffic through the provider’s external VPN servers.  These services provide benefits that solve for different challenges; but they all share the drawback that it is easy for the websites or company network you connect with to detect you are using a VPN service.

The RTH Signature VPN is not a commercial VPN service offering.  We are a consulting service that helps configure both your home network and two unique VPN devices you own to automatically create the secure tunnel and be easily used wherever you travel.  With RTH, we get you setup, and then you own an end-to-end VPN tunnel from your travel location of choice back to your own home.

With a typical commercial VPN service, you usually pay for a subscription and install a software program (VPN client) on your devices to connect them to any of the provider’s VPN servers using an encrypted tunnel.  These VPN services have many benefits: 

• Secures your private information and browsing.  For example, a wifi network you use at a coffee shop can normally see the sites you visit and services you connect to.  Likewise, your home ISP and DNS providers often collect and even sell tracking data.  A VPN limits much of this by placing all your traffic inside the secure tunnel to the VPN provider’s servers.
• Avoid bandwidth throttling.  Some providers slow or block certain types of traffic such as gaming, streaming or download services.  With a VPN, they cannot determine what type of service is being used or what content you may be accessing / downloading.
• Access region-blocked services like Netflix, regional sports coverage or even major banking / financial sites.  A VPN service can allow your traffic to appear to originate in any region where they maintain a VPN server.

As answered in the “What is the Signature VPN?”  The RTH Signature VPN is primarily focused on solving for a different challenge.  We provide a solution for your IP address to appear from home when you’re actually elsewhere… but wait, we can do both!

RTH’s solution offers flexibility to solve for many privacy challenges:

• When you travel and need your devices to appear to be connecting from home for work or otherwise, you can connect to your RTH configured travel router to your RTH configured home VPN server.
• After-hours, with a few button clicks, you can instead redirect your travel router to commercial VPN service to take advantage of privacy or avoid region blocking for all your personal travel devices.
• When back at home, you can easily connect your travel router in the same way with a commercial VPN service, providing a second home wifi network that is always VPN routed.

RTH Personal Support consulting service can also help you configure diverse options such as connecting separate homes into a single network.  The power of the RTH solution is we setup the devices you own with maximum functionality, giving you significant flexibility and options.

RTH is committed to customer satisfaction.  This includes empowering you with the knowledge of what your VPN can and cannot provide, so you can make informed decisions on how you responsibly use your tech.

The RTH Signature VPN can transparently encrypt and tunnel (mask) the original location of the internet traffic from any networked devices you own when it comes to connecting over the internet.  This is sufficient for most external services that rely on your IP address for geo-location; but there are some limits that no VPN solution can tackle when it comes to location awareness at a device administrator level:

• Device GPS tracking: If your devices contain GPS hardware, then your location can be tracked by anyone that has sufficient access to the GPS service or device’s GPS history.  For example, some organizations with higher security concerns (defense, government & contractors, field-work, proprietary tech, etc) may GPS equip their organization’s laptops and even use geo-fencing to provide alerts if a device leaves a specified area.  Some VPN services may claim to be able to spoof GPS locations to external services, but this does *not* work for situations where the organization has admin access to the device. 
• Company-owned cell phones: If your work cell phone is company-owned, then it’s location will very likely be easily accessible to the company, both because of the built-in location services (GPS) and the company’s direct access to the cellular provider’s service plan usage (roaming, cell tower connections, etc).
• Company-owned cellular plan: While you can tunnel all internet traffic sent by your phone (even over mobile data), this is separate from your phone’s radio antenna connecting to the local cell towers.  If you own your own phone, but it’s still using a direct-company contracted service plan, then they will have access to the plan’s usage data (such as roaming) from the cellular carrier.
• Company apps on personal phones: Again, you can route all your phone’s IP traffic (both wifi and mobile data IP traffic) over your VPN, including traffic from business apps you may use on your personal device; but you should be aware if any of these applications also have permissions to access your cell phone’s location services (built-in GPS).  You can always simply turn off GPS, and we have tips on small things to look out for with common business apps you may use from the app stores (e.g. Slack, Webex, Zoom, etc), but some companies may require you to install a more invasive “security” or administrator-level app in order to use your personal phone to access company resources.  Some of these apps may require location services (GPS) access and even have the ability to enable it directly.
• OS location services & background wifi scanning: Most laptops (and nearly all mobile) operating systems (OS) use background scanning to continually look for nearby available wifi networks you can connect to (e.g. the popup list of “available networks” when you turn on wifi).  This scanning includes data like the SSID (wifi network name) and MAC address (unique hardware code) of these available networks.  This data can then be cross-referenced with various online network mapping database to find the scanned wifi network’s physical location.  While in our experience it’s unusual for most organizations to actively monitor this type of data, it is stored for some time and can likely be collected if the device is audited.  All personal or work laptop users should be aware of the location data collection features of their OS and how to opt-out if desired (especially on personal devices) and/or turn off scanning.  More information for major laptop & desktop OS’ can be found here: Windows, Mac, Ubuntu.  

While we have customers that continue to successfully work remotely while traveling for years without issue, we strive to provide our customers with full transparency to all technical considerations.

These are some other highlights we feel anyone should be aware of when considering remote travel plans:

• VPN legality:  While VPNs are legal in most of the world, there are a few countries that ban or restrict VPN technology. 
• Sensitive or Export Controlled data:  If your organization utilizes access to such data there may be legal restrictions to traveling with a device that stores or could have access to that data from outside of your country.  This could even apply to customer or employee personal data that may be stored on your work devices.  Employees working with these types of data are usually trained on it’s proper safeguard and handling; and may have extra requirements prior to travel.  
• Physical device security and support:  Will your device be secured at your travel location and do you have a backup plan to continue working if your device breaks down while abroad?
• Company policy:  While many organizations are ambivalent about exact location requirements for remote workers, others may have formal policies regarding location.  RTH always recommends you familiarize yourself with your organization’s work and travel policies.  RTH consultants cannot provide you advice related to employment matters or policy.

RTH consultants are not qualified to provide legal advice and will not knowingly support or condone violation or circumvention of any country’s laws.