![]() ![]() ![]() Nord has clients for many devices, operating systems, and even browser extensions: Windows, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android, Linux, Chrome, Firefox, Android TV, Firestick, Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, Raspberry Pi, Chromebook, Chromecast, and Kindle Fire. These require you to purchase a dedicated server from NordVPN, and if you’re doing that, you’re probably not learning anything new from this Lab Note. But it’s not technically difficult at all.) Dedicated IP Serversįinally, there are Dedicated IP servers. (I don’t know how feasible it would be for a government to do that with every XOR key for every VPN server. This does not add additional protection of your data (the VPN’s encryption is still doing that), it simply defeats automatic blocking of VPN traffic.īut if you are really concerned with getting prosecuted by your government for merely using a VPN ($2,000 fine in China, $5,000 fine in Russia, god knows what in North Korea, …), be warned: anyone could easily get the XOR keys, load them into a device that inspects traffic, and reverse the bits to identify your VPN traffic. Then any device sitting between the client and server just sees unrecognizable data. Obfuscated Servers apply a very rudimentary way of preventing VPN traffic from being identified: the client and server share a key that is used to XOR bits on the wire. So they can’t see what you’re doing, but they can see that you’re trying to protect your privacy …and block you from doing so. While the contents of VPN traffic is (hopefully) extremely difficult for ISPs and governments to decrypt, they can easily identify traffic that is encrypted with a VPN. There are a few dozen Obfuscated Servers available. If you’re only browsing the web and you want to use tor you’re much better off using Tor Browser, instead. In my testing, the performance was often very poor/unusable. I suspect these are not very popular because I typically only see one or two available at any given time. With tor you have no idea what geographical area your connection will be coming out of and the quality of your connection can vary widely. With these, you can choose the country you’re connecting to, and then after that your connection goes over The Onion Router (kind of a free, open source, public VPN network) and will pass through at least two tor nodes before making it’s way to the end-service that you’re connecting to. Similarly, there are a couple Onion Over VPN (a.k.a. So for example if you’re using nl-uk11, your ISP can see you connecting to the Netherlands while the website you’re accessing sees you coming from the UK. This encrypts your traffic twice, and also causes an additional geographic hop between your client and your traffic as it leaves the VPN tunnel and travels across the network. Double VPN ServersĪs the name suggests, when you connect to a Double VPN server your traffic goes through two servers instead of one. It’s not clear what technical differences are, but I suspect they have additional bandwidth to handle the higher traffic demands of downloading large, non-copyrighted, totally legal files. ![]() In fact, every server with the P2P category also has the “Standard VPN Server” category (but not all Standard VPN Servers have the P2P category). The P2P servers are extremely similar to Standard VPN serves, but they are tuned for peer-to-peer file exchanges (like BitTorrent). For speed, you can choose a server that’s closest to you (which is what the “Quick Connect” button in the client does), or if you’d prefer to come from another geographical (or geopolitical) region you can choose a server that’s further away from you. So your device connects to the UK, and the website you’re visiting sees your connection come from the UK. With Standard VPN Servers, your device makes an encrypted tunnel to a single server and then your traffic goes through it. They call these “categories” or “technologies” in the API and various documentation. The first thing to know is that Nord offers servers with different capabilities. So I thought I’d share my findings of what lies just beneath that big blue “Quick Connect” button, and also a small script that simplifies getting information from their servers API endpoint. I’ve occasionally used NordVPN the past few years, but while working on another Cofense Lab Note I learned about the service’s more advanced features. ![]()
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