This sounds pretty neat, and I do dig the website, though I can’t help but think it’s an odd combination to have bitmap/pixelated fonts and graphics inside perfect squircles.

Seems like you guys have two distinct ideas of a visual identity completely at odds there. Shape contrast is nice and can be rather fun to play with, but it has to be handled with care. Right now it feels like the designer had a bunch of ideas and didn’t know how to bring them together in a cohesive identity.

Bonus point for the TRON reference at the end! “I fight for the users!”

i am very skeptical of most vpn companies, and while i haven't looked too hard at obscura, it is worth noting the official partnership with mullvad (https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-partnered-with-obscura-v...) which is certainly a positive signal

side note: i really wish more companies did the no email + randomized account number flow. there is a certain popular "pro-privacy" product beloved by many here that requires an email address and refuses to offer a similar account number method, which has turned me off the product.

there is a certain popular "pro-privacy" product beloved by many here

Please don’t speak in riddles. Just say what you mean.

for what purpose? there is nothing to be gained from pointing fingers, and takes the discussion in an even more unrelated direction.

although i guess people's curiosity is also dragging my comment in an unrelated direction anyways. lose-lose situation.

my main point is that the account number method is really nice, and a great selling point for such privacy-conscious products. not offering it in a privacy-conscious product is enough signal that it has made me choose not to purchase the product. that's the important bit, and where i was hoping to drive the conversation.

Because it creates confusion as proven by the responses mistakenly assuming that you were referring to proton.

and if i mention the company, the responses are all about the company instead of the feature.

next time i will just keep my thoughts to myself and we'll all be happy.

There is even less to be gained by issuing vague unactionable warnings and/or accusations...

They’re almost certainly referencing Signal.

... a certain popular "pro-privacy" product beloved by many here ...

If you're talking about Proton VPN, they do support "credential-less accounts" through their official apps, I believe? At least, on Android since 2024: https://www.androidpolice.com/proton-vpn-works-without-accou...

i am hesitant to really narrow it down, but it is not proton (i am a very early proton customer)

privacy <> anonymity

Proton VPN ensures privacy.

Basically a middle-man for a Mullvad VPN, where if Mullvad decides to pull out of their agreement with this company, you lose your connection and are hopefully refunded.

The single point of failure for this product is Mullvad and its leadership's changing opinions.

I don't understand the point of this.

Many (if not all) of the benefits on the landing page are available in Mullvad too, which is a more mature and reputable product, has all clients fully open-source, and powers the exit servers for Obscura.

Why should I choose this over Mullvad?

Mullvad is a Swedish company, which has stricter privacy protection laws in place.

According to Obscura's legal page, it is a New York-based company [0]. Under US law, a secretive court order could compel a US company to update software or implement targeted logging on a specific user without notifying that user.

The only scenario where Obscura would be useful is if Mullvad were compromised. Why would I trust a New York company to shield me from a more reputable Swedish company?

[0]: "(2) your written notification must be mailed to 169 Madison Ave.; Ste. 11185 PMB 63183; New York, NY 10016..." https://obscura.com/legal/

The EU is working to make what Mullvad is doing illegal.

https://codamail.com/articles/privacy-law-directory/internat...

"EU surveillance co-operation"

The EU is working to make what Mullvad is doing illegal.

In other news, it has been demonstrated in a court of law that Mullvad "no logs" means no logs.

TL;DR: Six police officers turned up at Mullvad offices with a search warrant for logs and data. Mullvad said "take a look for yourself". They went home with nothing.

Lots of people on HN and elsewhere are spreading a lot of FUD about the EU and what the EU MIGHT do – remember MIGHT .... politicians discuss a lot of stuff, and a lot of it never gets implemented.

It is the job of politicians to discuss issues of the day and potential ways to deal with them.

One thing that is clear. The EU is not a dicatorship. They have a long history of listening and acting on what industry experts tell them. Even if it means "watering down" ideas being discussed by the politicians.

I have a lot of faith that Mullvad (and, frankly, all the other VPN providers) would make a lot of noise if any of this EU FUD people are spreading actually ever became reality.

Until then, I suggest people put the EU FUD tin-foil hat to one side.

[1] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/4/20/mullvad-vpn-was-subjec... [2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/update-the-swedish-authorities-a...

(Carl from Obscura here)

I love folks who are also reasoning through security models! A few things to note here:

- We believe that all software running on a user's computer should be open source, so you can audit and build your own client: https://github.com/Sovereign-Engineering/obscuravpn-client

- With traditional Single-Party VPNs, even if you trust them fully and they're honest, they can still be compromised or hacked. With Obscura, even if we're hacked there's nothing to leak (other than WireGuard packets fully encrypted to Mullvad's servers).

- The change in trust is that instead of trusting a single company (Mullvad), you're trusting that not both Obscura AND Mullvad have been compromised, which is strictly less likely.

The "Obscura and Mullvad" argument actually makes sense. Having a company outside of EU jurisdiction makes it hard for both layers to be compromised at the same time.

Another question: How does the Obscura client get the Mullvad exit server’s public key? Are they hardcoded at compile time, fetched from Mullvad's server, or fetched from Obscura's server?

The latter seems to be dangerous if there isn't some kind of signature verification done on the client side before using the key.

Having a company outside of EU jurisdiction makes it hard for both layers to be compromised at the same time.

Its just very, very, very unfortunate that they chose the US for Obscura.

Of all the jurisdictions in the world you chose the one that has become exponentially untrustworthy in the eyes of non-US users ....

Sweden was compromised years ago, Assange's case is proof.

Because its CEO is known as the sponsor of the Orebro party?

1.5k comments discussion for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469

That indeed can be a problem for many.

Calls for ethical purity are usually very selective, serving to protect incumbents.

For example, every big tech company supports the current US administration in some capacity, either with funds, their surveillance stack or both.

Almost noone has stopped using big tech products and services because of that. (Unfortunately!)

But beware! There is someone in one tiny, privacy-preserving company who is doing something that not everyone agrees with!

That is a big problem, right? I think this is a big problem, everyone!

You see those comments in every Mullvad thread, but not necessarily in every thread about big tech products or services.

I think many people have absolutely stopped giving money to US corporations that are run by fascists like Musk or DHH. Of course, this is and will never be the majority (many people don't care or don't know), but I am certain it's a non-trivial number of people.

I am sure there are quite a few people out there who have avoided getting a mainstream smartphone setup or other big tech services.

As you wrote yourself, this is not the majority. Quite the understatement.

However, this is only a tangential notion in my comment. What do you think of my (probably not unique or novel) observation that calls for ethical purity seem to be very selective in a way that (in effect!) benefits big tech?

For example: The other person in this very thread who pointed out that Mullvad is not perfectly pure recommended iCloud in their previous HN comment three days ago. Did their attitude change in this three days? Unlikely.

iCloud is a service from a company that deplatforms ICE transparency apps, among many other things. Its then CEO, Tim Cook, personally gifted one million USD to Donald Trump for his inauguration. (The very thing they criticized: "... their CEO is directly funding a far-right ...")

Humans are rarely pure or heavenly. Double standards help incumbents.

I'm not interested in generalising "calls for moral purity" as if all ethical concerns are equivalent.

There is a difference, also, between saying, "I am not morally okay with this, so I am going to do X", vs. "If you don't also do X, you are a Bad Person."

To me, after reading up on the platform of the right-wing party in question and Mullvad's CEO's level of involvement with it, the situation with Mullvad is worse. And because it is a much smaller company, a much greater percentage of my money would go to that CEO in particular. And my choice to pay or not has much more influence on Mullvad than it ever could have on Apple.

Others are free to feel otherwise, and to use their money as they please.

Besides, there are plenty of small company alternatives, like IVPN, which was recommended widely around the time this news broke. And I think that people who found out about Mullvad are likely often the sort to put thought and research into their choice of VPN, rather than just buying NordVPN or whatever based on name recognition only.

A single data point is pretty meaningless. If there were actually data to be found on how the customer base numbers or growth rates of the various VPN companies have or haven't shifted since the news broke, that would be interesting.

Ultimately though, what other people do or don't choose to do is irrelevant to my own choice. Moral purity, as you call it, is impossible. The world is not simple. I am going to do my best to make ethical choices anyway.

We think Mullvad is a great privacy tool, which is why we partnered with them!

As for what's different: We're a Multi-*Party* Relays (vs. traditional VPNs which are Single-Party Relays): https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/11/17/where-are-...

With Multi-Party Relays you no longer have a trust a single entity not being malicious or compromised. More on this here: https://obscura.com/#how

Also, all our apps are open-source as well: https://github.com/Sovereign-Engineering/obscuravpn-client

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Obscura.

How do you compare with iCloud Private Relay (with the obvious exception that private relay only works on macOS, and in specific apps only)?

We're heavily inspired by them (see our original blog post which is a bit more technical here: https://obscura.com/blog/bootstrapping-trust/)

The differences are:

- We allow you to choose an exit location (I believe iCloud Private Relay restricts you to the same location)

- Our exit hop is Mullvad instead of Cloudflare+Fastly+Akamai

- We use QUIC for transport instead of HTTP/3 (which is built on QUIC and has a bit more overhead)

A lot of people are abandoning Mullvad because their CEO is directly funding a far-right political party.

As they should, IMHO.

That actually signals that the CEO has a legit reason for Mullvad to work really well.

Purity politics, doesn't work sorry, just highlights hypocrisy.

I can't see how this has any bearing on the functioning of Mullvad, if they were campaigning on circumventing privacy rights it'd be a different story.

How does this prove Obscura and Mullvad can't just both gather tracking data and then just combine it on demand?

and how is it better than just connecting to mullvad over nordvpn or something?

If you're already a Tailscale user, seems like this solution is nearly identical to using Mullvad as an exit node.

You would go with this solution if you don't trust Tailscale or NordVPN, I guess.

(Carl from Obscura here)

I could be wrong but in Tailscale if you use Mullvad as an exit node, the traffic flows directly from your device to Mullvad's servers.

Whereas with Obscura, your traffic flows to the Obscura relay, then the Mullvad exit.

Yes, but your tailnet IP is what is provided to Mullvad's servers. Not your public IP or personally identifiable information (according to Tailscale).

I'm under the impression that my personal device isn't the WireGuard endpoint for the Mullvad connection, Tailscale is.

I believe if your device connects directly to Mullvad they will have your real IP (to know where to send reply packets)

So like OHTTP but for UDP traffic? I suppose they are using MASQUE CONNECT-UDP?

They are careful to not exactly claim the same anonymity properties of Tor, though I think a lay reader will read that differently (ie, that they do have the same anonymity property as Tor).

That said being able to verify the inner wireguard conn to mullvad is nice. Of course you have to trust them that they aren't colluding with mullvad to share your identity/ip. But same goes for OHTTP.

So two hops, basically. First hop sees your IP address but not the website you're going to, second hop sees website but not IP address. Similar to Private Relay: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602.

But if both services keep logs de-anonymization is a join.

(Carl from Obscura here)

Very true, but if even 1 of (Obscura, Mullvad) is honest, there's no de-anonymization.

For traditional Single-Party VPNs, you just need to compromise 1 party, with Two-Party Relays, you need to compromise both.

(Carl from Obscura here)

Yup, exactly!

Cool work. Can I ask: why not use MASQUE for this, instead of WireGuard-over-QUIC? Is it because it meant less changes on your partner's side?

As others have pointed out, this is like Apple iCloud Private Relay, and other multi-hop privacy systems that have been built on and off over the last several decades (Tor included).

We wrote a research paper on the general principle a few years ago: https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2022/papers/hotnets2...

a vpn company is a paid for MITM attack surface.

the first VPN that can’t log your activity and outsmarts internet censorship.

I guess they never heard of Zero Knowledge Systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Knowledge_Systems

Carl from Obscura here

Happy to answer any questions y’all might have!

Also, the technical folks may be more interested in our original post: https://obscura.com/blog/bootstrapping-trust/

Hi Carl, thanks for being here to answer questions. Two questions: Do you have any active testers in Iran right now, and secondly, how is this architected to deal with advanced DPI boxes in ISP networks that detect flows of encrypted traffic and drop it? The methods I'm seeing people use with success from within Iran right now are very different than something like a commercial mullvad or competitor VPN.

Some of them rely on people having a helpful third party in ("free") country to set up a private relay in something like Azure IP space that isn't used by any other VPN users, so it doesn't attract a level of attention (or attention by multiples of different peoples' encrypted flows) that publicly published commercial VPN services do. It's a hard problem to solve on a scale of more than a couple of people.

The multi party relay concept is great, my concerns are more with traffic detection/DPI in between the end user and the first hop in the relay.

Vp.net did it first: https://vp.net/l/en-US/technical#cryptography

https://obscura.com/check/ does this page know the difference between a direct mullvad user and an obscura user, if so, how?

Packet padding but no docs about this?

Many VPNs don't log activity. Headline is objectively false.

I hope MPTCP would be more popular

Many src-dst connections but as a single logical connection. There's no way any middlebox could easy capture full data even metadata.

http2/QUIC can do something similar with frames (and hopefully multipath)

Don't place your whole stream inside a single src-dst IP connection. Demux them into many paths over the Internet. We need more variety of "traffic shapes" to combat Internet surveillance.

I'd argue it's even more effective than encryption. Split your activity and mix them, monitor traffic over a single transport is useless.

(Carl from Obscura here)

Yeah it'd be a cool addition to combat internet surveillance but in practicality it may have a lot of problems:

1. Deteriorated performance if it's across unequal links (3G vs. Fibre WiFi)

2. Many countries have single exits to the global internet so they'd be able to assemble everything there

3. The most important plaintext data is probably in the TLS SNI which usually sits in a single packet for TLS in HTTP/3

Exit servers (run by Mullvad) connect you to the internet but never see your personal info. Obscura masks your real IP address when relaying to the exit server.

How is this possible? If the exit server doesn't know your IP, how does it know where to send the traffic?

I hate to be the one to throw stones at an outfit that is trying to do something good, protecting people's privacy.

But the claim in Obscura's FAQ that paying with Bitcoin or Monero offers more privacy than paying with a credit card is sadly misguided. No-KYC cryptocurrency is largely a thing of the past, and outfits like Chainanalysis can associate a Lightning or Monero address to a human with near-perfect accuracy. The fact that Obscura's FAQ doesn't acknowledge this makes me feel like its author was either pretending this is not the case, or is unaware of it. Either of those is pretty bad.

Mullvad lets customers sign up for an account and pay in cash, which is a good, privacy-preserving choice. In the US, payment by postal money order or by gift card, either of which can be purchased with cash, would also be good choices. Users, and Obscura, should not be fooled by some vague association of cryptocurrency and privacy. In the age of ubiquitous KYC that ship has sailed with the possible exception of ZCash. And I wouldn't bet my life on ZCash, either.

It would be cool if there were a way to use it the other way around. A Mullvad server as the entry point and an Obscura server as the exit point. My main problem with Mullvad right now is that its servers are blocked almost everywhere or generate an excessive number of Captchas. With other VPNs, that’s been much less of an issue so far. Alternatively, a residential proxy might be a good option as an optional exit point. One way to achieve this, for example, would be through a partnership with a regular ISP from which you could then borrow IP addresses.

My main problem with Mullvad right now is that its servers are blocked almost everywhere or generate an excessive number of Captchas

Why not buy a Low End Box and run one of the WG Setup scripts to get you going? You'll lose the anonymity, but its your box, a clean IP, significantly cheaper than a commercial vpn.

There are two types of VPN users: those who care about privacy and those who care about bypassing DPI.