At my job, we work from home. I use a VPN given by my company to access my Remote Desktop on my laptop (this is not a company laptop, this is my own personal device). I’ve read through the company policies and nothing states against using a double VPN- as in, another personal VPN on my laptop to mask my IP address. There is something in the policy about not being allowed dual tunneling, but from what I’ve read, this is something different completely.
The reason I want to mask my location from my work, is because I want to visit my parents in a different part of the country (a few hours’ drive from my city) and the company wants us to work from home from our literally homes because they think if we work from somewhere else, we would just be on vacation without putting in leave, which is not the case for me, I’ll be working the same hours as usual just from a different location.
How can I ensure that my company can’t see my location through the company VPN when I log on. Will another personal VPN work to mask my IP address?
There’s more that goes into working somewhere else. Your company may have laws and regulations that forbid them from “operating” in other states. Its not that they consider working elsewhere your vacation.
You can host your own server at home and connect to that, but there’s still ways your company can find out where you are. I personably wouldn’t risk it. This is essentially the same as the daily posts about trying to work outside of the country. At the very least, you could ask your company if working from your parents house can be arranged. As long as there’s no company policies or laws being broken about operating in that region, I don’t see why they would forbid it.
Host a server at home (PiVPN if you can open port, Tailscale/ZeroTier if you can’t open port), get a router with built-in VPN client functionality, and take it with you.
However, the app from the company might scan the available wifi network (without actually connecting to it) and can deduce its rough location (basically the same way your phone locate you even without any view to the sky). Sure you can disable wifi and plug a cable to the router instead, but that can also be logged.
The previous paragraph doesn’t apply if the corp VPN is just a regular IKEv2/OpenVPN/WireGuard config loaded by a generic VPN client.
Also, your latency change, depending on how far you are from your home, may or may not be noticeable by the IT.
One of the biggest issues people fave is the dreaded Double VPN.
Unless you have Admin privileges, you can’t download VPN to your work machine. And even if you could, the company likely runs it’s own and that’s a conflict.
The solution is not software, it’s hardware. But rather than try to become an expert in building VPN tunnels, you can always just buy one.