Independent auditors confirm top VPN doesn't log your data

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 285 points – Independent auditors confirm top VPN doesn't log your data
techradar.com
  • Deloitte confirms PIA's no-log claims, with servers running on RAM-only system for maximum privacy.
  • Independent audit verifies PIA's infrastructure is not vulnerable to third-party exploitation, ensuring online activity remains private.
  • PIA offers full transparency with open-source apps and regular third-party audits, proving its commitment to data protection.
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PIA got purchased by Kape Technologies a couple years ago. With their track record, you can choose to believe the report issued by consultants they paid, or you can just go to companies with better track records, like Mozilla VPN or Mullvad.

Seems like an easy choice to me.

Or Proton.

I use Proton vpn and love it. I actually like mullvad more as a standalone vpn, but Proton vpn is still great and I use it because of the whole bundle. It's a great deal and VERY convenient. The unlimited email aliases built in seamlessly to the password manager is a game changer for easy to use privacy.

Hey so I just looked up Proton and see no mention on their main marketing page for email aliases or password manager. Where can I find thst? I'm intrigued obviously haha. I've been woth Norn for a couple years but dont do anything crazy or get additional benefits.

Others have linked it to you but let me tell you why I like it. It lets you generate a new email alias and password instantly whenever you make a new online account somewhere. Or just whenever you want. I've been slowly changing all my accounts over to their own unique email alias that can't be tied back to my main email. My main address is known by nobody at all.

The main benefits are if someone steals a password, the email address that comes with it will only be useful for that one account. (I don't need to go over the benefits of a standard password manager.) and so if that email is leaked or added to a spam list, I simply delete that address after changing the address for the single account it was used for. I can tell exactly which address is getting spam easily. 0 spam. Ever. Spam email has been solved for me.

Proton remembers which sites use which email/password as well.

Other than that, it's just good for privacy. Having a different email for each account makes it harder to track a user across accounts.

These addresses are somewhat auto generated, with the name of the site along with a random word and a few numbers. But if you want to create another email address, you get a handful of custom ones for free with the subscription too. You can revoke these the same way, so you can have a professional looking email to hand out to people that's not auto generated, without giving out your account's root email address.

Edit: I also want to specify that while all of this is technically possible through other means, Proton makes it easier than any other option. Plus access to a good vpn, a nice replacement for Google drive (for storage and basic editing, at least) in addition to the email service and password manager mentioned above. A very good deal, in my opinion.

Edit 2: it sure sounds like I'm a paid shill but I can assure you I just really fucking love Proton and I get too excited about things.

I appreciate your type up! Thanks for taking the time. Didnt come off as a shill at all was explanatory and informative which is what I was looking for. Thanks again and habe a great weekemd!

Yeah the moment Proton developed a password manager I switched. Very convenient and the price ain't bad if you use all their services.

Proton also, unlike PIA, doesn't routinely crash and break my VPN access on iPhone.

My sessions go until I disable them (for stuff like sports betting that legally has to restrict VPN usage).

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Yeah as soon as I saw Delloite I knew it was shit.

I understand the sentiment about the inherent conflict of interest with paying someone to audit your software, but it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to do that work for free. I'd want some evidence before taking your comment for anything other than opinion/bias. I don't use any of these products so whatever the reality is doesn't affect me, it just seems like nuance is too easily lost.

What’s wrong with PIA’s track record?

I loved mullvad but they removed port forwarding and now I don't know where to go sadly.

I think Air VPN supports port forwarding

Do they but unfortunately they are also slower. I could get max 600 Megabits per second with them. I now use proton that supports at least 2,5 gigabits

Actually I mentioned AirVPN because I forgot that Proton supports port forwarding 😄

Their port forwarding works but it's very annoying because it changes the port after each connection.

Fortunately I use a third party app that automatically updates qbittorrent with the new port.

Can we trust them though (I mean as much as mullvad) ?

I am inclined to say see. But probably just because I bought a three years subscription and need a peace of mind. Sadly their vl8ent is crap but at least wireguard works fine.

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Hey, if your adversarial model does not include nation states, it’s a great service. Totally fine against basic IP tracking, and I haven’t received a nastygram for sharing movies in years.

Which one is good against nation states? Asking for a friend.

If you need to ask, you probably don't know enough to keep yourself anonymous. But it starts with tails, tor and not doing anything stupid like reusing user names that you use on the clear web or signing into something like Facebook. If a nation state has reason to find out who you are, they most likely will. All it takes is one little mistake that you most likely didn't even know was a mistake.

Use the one they’re using: Tor.

There’s a long list of reasons why you might not want to use it though.

By default, Tor doesn't protect you from nation states. It's a start, but you have to be an intelligent user who understands statistics to have some protection from nation states.

Let's assume there's two teams, because in geopolitics, it seems like we divide into "west" and "east." Let's assume team 1 controls 10% [1] of the relays, they have more than enough budget to pay for the entire network 100x over. That means, on entry, there's a 10% probability that you will land on their entry node.

Now, to do traffic analysis, they need you to also land on their exit. The probability of that is also 10% in the example. In other words, 10% of the time that you have their entry, you will also have their exit. (or, for 1 in every 100 circuits, you will have a compromised circuit) If you use Tor everyday for a year, you'll likely have a fucked circuit at least once. If you use something like Whonix that spawns like 10-20 circuits at start, you'll have a compromised circuit weekly.

A compromised circuit isn't the end of the world. Most internet traffic today uses end to end encryption, [2] so as long as the service is outside of team 1's jurisdiction, your communications are safe... but team 1 knows who you are, and that you are talking to someone they don't trust. If it's in their jurisdiction, they can get a warrant, and they can fully de-anonymize the traffic between the service that you were using.

All of this is to say, it's hard to stay in the dark if your adversary is information intelligence. The best way to stay invisible is to use the network as infrequently as possible, and to make the time correlation very far off. (Use custom relays that delay when the traffic travels so that traffic analysis like this example is not possible)

By the way, in the US, the NSA has multiple sites where they copy the traffic on the backbone for analysis. They're performing some deep packet analysis. These systems are going to improve in the future with machine learning. As an example, in China, it's not exactly simple to connect to Tor as some methods of concealing Tor traffic result in detection from machine learning that they're performing on all traffic.

[1] This is a hypothetical. They could control 0%, 5%, 25%, etc. It's publicly unknown how much they control or if they try to control the network at all.

[2] Be careful with your assumptions about https. Where are the root authorities? Why should we trust them? It's better security to never trust them.

Fascinating. Thank goodness my life doesn’t depend on that kind of threat modeling.

They don't actually need to control the entrance nodes if they control the ISP. You can track TCP fingerprints through Tor with just exit nodes

Go on

Biggest problem is that it’s free. That means you’ve got very little bandwidth that’s usable since it’s being supplied out of generosity for no direct compensation that could be reinvested into the network. There’s just too many users and not enough bandwidth.

And because it actually works, it’s very difficult or impossible to police how it’s used. That means your precious bits are just as important as the 100,000 spam emails that another user is trying to send with the service.

Finally, you might not want to use it because you’re sharing the same exit nodes with many other users. This means services tend to block those IP addresses outright, limiting what you can use it for, and if you leak and identify such as your name maybe you don’t want that tied to an IP address that actual terrorists might have used.

I write this as someone who owns a bunch of official Tor merchandise.

Spam emails are about the tamest dark part of the dark web though...

I’m trying to be nice for the general public that could be reading this post. But yes, there’s a lot of bad stuff out there, and VPN service providers aren’t just getting paid to invest in tons of bandwidth, but they are also doing some policing of their service. They just don’t talk about it. It’s bad for business. And yes, you can police a service without technically logging any data.

What is "official tor merchandise" btw?

They sell things! I’ve bought mostly graphic clothing at funding events. You’ll find some presence at big hacker conventions. You could sometimes get a few goodies if you operate large nodes or provide significant contributions in other ways.

The solar powered RPI jump box you installed on a telephone pole outside the McDonald's.

Who told you about that?

That is.. I don't know what you mean..

Exactly. If all you want to do is torrent then it's by far the best option. $2.22/mo ($80 for 3 years) which is less than half the price of anything else, has portforwarding, and with wireguard I can saturate a full gigabit no problem on private trackers.

And while they have a sale it gets down to 68 for three years...

This just reads like an ad. There doesn't seem to be any journalistic value to this article and it's got a clickbait title. At minimum, it should have noted results for competitors.

How is that a clickbait title?? If this is clickbait, there is no possible title that wouldn't be..

Lol what the hell does Deloitte know about technical infrastructure.

I am dedicated to Proton to be honest but PIA always seemed good to me based on these type of situations and audits.

I think there was some bad vibes when they got bought by a less than reputable company a while back. I know a lot of people, myself included switched to Mullvad. I am on Proton now though for the port forwarding.

What is the benefit of port forwarding?

The most common use case is probably bittorrent. Without port forwarding, you won't be connectable. But anything where someone might need to connect to your local machine from the internet, like hosting game servers or other self-hosting.

I recently switched to Mullvad and have had no issues torrenting

You have no problem downloading because your client is initiating the connection. But people won't be able to initiate a connection to you. If you're just leeching off public trackers and don't care about your ratio, then that might not matter to you. But if you're trying to maintain a ratio on a good quality private tracker that's a no go.

You can use a site like this with your VPN ip and the port you have configured for bittorrent while your bittorrent client is up to see if you're connectable.

PIA was good until they got bought out. That's when my friend and I switched our VPNs (me to proton, him to express).

A shady parent company isn't what you want in a VPN.

On September 13, 2021, it was reported that ExpressVPN had been acquired by Kape Technologies, an LSE-listed digital privacy and security company

I'm on Express VPN only because they apparently specialise in avoiding geoblocks and VPN detection for overseas TV sites etc. (Plus three months free for being a TWiT.) So far it's true for BBC iPlayer, RTe Player and UK Channel 4. For this purpose I'm not overly worried about how log-resistant they are, but interesting to keep up with the score here. The integrated 'ad blocking' is also useful, but slower than AdGuard as it seems pages have to wait for assets to fail to load before displaying rather than just being 404'd.

I wonder how they manage to bypass the geo-location blocks? I would if they frequently rotate their IP Addresses with fresh ones.

Possibly, or they have multiple entry points on residential ISP blocks and don't have too many people NAT'd per IP so it looks legit. That would explain the higher costs.

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Remember when Google wasn't evil?

Nah, it's time for something other than email that does what email did before but without the ability to spam or inject bad stuff.

I wonder, is there a way to ensure they work the way they advertise to besides being investigated by the police and observing the result? It has to be blatant in order to force the VPN service to comply if they can.

It's a case od who do you believe more. The provider or the police.

How is windscribe?

I tried it for awhile. Speed was good, unfortunately for my use case had some show stoppers.

Pros: -It worked good on Linux. -Custom pricing plans (you can pick exactly which nodes you need and only pay for those) available month-to-month, makes it easy to try

Cons: -Android app couldn't remain connected as I move from mesh WiFi pod to pod. It would think its connected still but I would have no internet connectivity until I manually reconnected the app. (Everytime I crossed my house I would have to manually reconnect). -No port forwarding (torrents)

Ended up switching to airvpn. Use "openVPN for Android" which handles the mesh pods, and openvpn on Linux as well. Works perfectly.

Port forwarding is available with Windscribe. A temporary, resetable one is included in pro plans. Permanent port forwarding is available for additional costs

I am also interested in the Lemmy opinion of windscribe. My wife really likes them but their app used to brick my computer requiring a hard reset so I don't use them.

their app used to brick my computer requiring a hard reset so I don't use them.

Which OS?

Windows 10. I've since moved on to 11 but haven't tried it since then.

How to you syslog or net flow to identify malicious actions if you’re not logging?