Information Security Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for information security professionals. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am about to start a work at home position using a mac. I will be using my own personal internet to connect to their servers through their VPN.
I want to isolate my work PC from accessing my home PC internet use; is there an easy way to acheive this? From what I understand I can isolate my work PC from the network which will effectively hide my home PC's history, what would be the easiest way to do this?
Buy a small OpenWRT router with a WAN ethernet port and LAN wifi and/or LAN ethernet port.
Plug the WAN port of your OpenWRT router on your home network.
Plug your work computer on the LAN port of your small OpenWRT router.
Configure OpenWRT router's firewall with a strict ruleset allowing only internet access and denying every access to your LAN.
And that's it. This is basically the cheapest and simplest solution for a poor-man network isolation ;-) A manageable switch with VLAN support would be the ultimate solution, but the price isn't the same (a small OpenWRT router with dual ethernet and wifi will cost you about 20$).
You may find your home router/access point has this functionality built-in in the form of a Guest Wi-Fi network which is isolated from the rest of your LAN. Take a look at your router's documentation etc.
If you fear that people from your workspace will access your home PC, then VPN with the usual settings does not allow communication between your home network and your workplace's network. When you connect to your workplace with your VPN client, your home network becomes hidden for your computer and people from your workplace cannot access any computer from your home network. It works by design this way. Even if soembody could see your home PC from your workspace, they would not be able to access it unless you have a server application running on it. For example Windows file shares, FTP server, etc. are needed to see anything. And even if they can see these servers they need to guess their password. Ofc. it is possible to monitor traffic, especially if it is not encrypted, but it would be a little bit paranoid to think that your employer would break into your network and spy on you. But if you insist then many routers nowadays have guest network, so you can add your work PC to that and keep everything else on your local network.
