NordVPN has announced this week a new protocol it says will enable it to bypass VPN blocks in countries like Russia and India. The company’s new NordWhisper protocol, as it is called, is said to mimic regular internet traffic so internet service providers and websites do not know the traffic is coming through a masked service.
VPNs are a great way to not only keep internet activities obscured for privacy reasons or access geo-restricted media, but they are especially helpful in countries where authoritarian regimes try and tightly manage the flow of information available to citizens. Unfortunately, it is possible to identify traffic coming from VPNs and cut it off. Way back before Spotify was available in the U.S., I would access it through a VPN; the company would periodically identify that traffic and cut it off.
VPNs like NordVPN work by routing internet requests first to one of their own servers, and then passing the request along to the destination. This allows internet users to hide their origin—an individual may be in India and unable to access content on the U.S. version of YouTube. By sending the request first to a VPN server in the Americas, YouTube does not realize it is actually coming from another country entirely. All it sees is a request for YouTube.com coming from another computer in the U.S. VPNs also ensure all requests are encrypted so they cannot be intercepted on their way to the destination, which is particularly helpful for those in countries less amenable to open expression.
Unfortunately, because VPNs will have many requests being sent from one server, website hosts can recognize when a VPN is being used. A constant stream of requests coming from one computer’s IP address is, of course, unusual behavior.
NordVPN claims to have found a way to make traffic from its service look normal, though admits that it may not always work perfectly. It also says the NordWhisper protocol may introduce more latency. The protocol is rolling out first to users on Windows, Linux, and Android. Support for other platforms will come in the future.
China and Russia in particular have cracked down on VPN use, forcing Apple to remove related apps from their respective app stores and using other means to block the traffic from passing through internet service providers. Russia has been testing severing its domestic internet connection to the global web altogether. But for now, VPNs still appear to work there. Some VPNs have been criticized for questionable data security practices—users are sharing all their internet activity with a third-party company, after all, which could be subject to government warrants or other intrusions.
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