WireGuard
Also called: wireguard vpn, tailscale, headscale
WireGuard is a fast, modern VPN protocol that creates an encrypted private network between devices, commonly used to reach a home server without exposing it publicly.
WireGuard is a VPN protocol built around modern cryptography and a very small codebase — a few thousand lines against hundreds of thousands for OpenVPN and IPsec. It is in the mainline Linux kernel, and it is fast enough that it rarely becomes the bottleneck.
For self-hosting it is the usual answer to remote access. Rather than publishing a service to the internet, you join your devices to a private network; the server is reachable from your laptop and phone and invisible to everyone else.
Managing keys and endpoints by hand is the friction, which is why Tailscale (hosted coordination) and Headscale (self-hosted coordination) exist. Both handle NAT traversal and key distribution.
The trade-off against a reverse tunnel: a VPN is better for private personal access, while a tunnel is better when you need a URL you can share.