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Edward Snowden said on Twitter that users of Express VPN should reconsider the subscription of the service. This is because the CIO of Express VPN was involved in the creation of spying tracking tools – a red flag if you ask me. Not only that but there are reasons why VPN users should be worried. Ultimately, they need to trust that the company will not do anything with the generated data, nor sell and neither hand it to the government. And no matter how reliable a VPN provider can be, even if they don’t sell users’ personal data, they will be subject to the jurisdiction of the nation that its service is based on. All this blows the point of having a VPN in the first place.
When you connect to a site, you make a direct connection between your device, your internet provider and, the website host – this is how you’re reading this. The VPN's job is to request the information that you want for your internet provider and then from the website host. It does this by what is called a secure tunnel, an easy way to say that your data is encrypted in packs when you send it and receive it. The vantage of this is that your internet connection is way more secure and your digital footprint is almost invisible, making it more private. That is why it's called Virtual Private Network.
VPN is an awesome service. A necessary service, I should say. In the digital era, when, still, there’s a lot of places in the world that you can’t access content freely, either because of national laws or because internet is a state-centred business. In theses cases VPNs brands itself as a portal for information, new markets, and an open world - and sure it is. I use VPN to watch Swedish TV channels online, to improve my listening skills. People are using it to download films (, german friends), access censored content and, probably, because it makes everything more private and secure, for using crypto too. The only actual problem is that VPN providers are all centralized. and state-dependent VPN promises you virtual freedom, but they are entrenched in the system.
That’s why I was astonished when I learned abou dVPNs: Decentralized Virtual Private Networks.
DVPN, or P2P VPN, do almost the same jobs as VPN, without the necessity to depend on a centralized server that is owned by a private company. Rather than that, different individuals around the world can run a node by itself. Different than VPNs that could be straight down forbidden for any legislative power, dVPNS are much more difficult to be taken down, given their generous amount of decentralized running nodes. With no master server controlling the ecosystem, they’ll are clearly more censorship-resistant. The services also make it possible to pay with cryptocurrency: this adds an extra layer for security and privacy for it's end users, because they don't need to rely on any bank system. Besides that, dVPN projects compensate their node runners with its native cryptocurrency. With it, you can either HODL, sell or reuse it to pay for your personal use of the dVPN service.
Pretty neat, if you ask me.
Two questions may arise. Both of them are related to trust: 1) How can a stranger connection be secure for me? 2) Why should I expose my IP running a node?
First, trafficking information throughout a stranger computer sounds absolutely non-private and intrinsically a bad idea. However, when you run a dVPN node, the data is encrypted when transmitted from one place to another. That is to say, that node providers can’t see what you are requesting from its bandwidth. Besides that, dVPNs platforms are committed to an explicitly no-logs policy and are open-source. Sure, VPNs services say the same over no-logs policy, but they are not open-source, which means that people can’t verify that. The user’s data is also “decomposed” through many process of shredding and encryption, which makes it virtually impossible to cherry-pick one user's data from the network.
Second, node providers expose their IP to an enormous amount of stranger’s data trafficking. This will protect the user, but makes your IP vulnerable. More than that the node provider can be confused as some users are involved in illegal activities. In the worst-case scenario, node providers can be held responsible for bad user web-behavior. The website dVPN Alliance gives some guidance for node runners on how you can protect yourself either against attacks or against criminal charges. This is why the compensation for the node runners is so important. One of the greatest challenges of dVPNs platforms is this: how can you both incentive node providers and make them safe?
With the larger adoption of dVPNs, it’s expected that more nodes will be available all around the world, making it possible to create big blocks of nodes. This will essentially dilute user’s data that is processed by single nodes, which solves the problem of IP overexposure and give node runners more safety against being held responsible for the user’s criminal behavior. This also adds an extra layer of data security and privacy for the user.
Some people will notice similarities between de dVPNs and Tor Browser. In fact, some people say da Tor is already a dVPN for being “serverless”. Similarities arise because both are decentralized and have a P2P node system. Yet, Tor doesn't have any compensation system, which makes it less attractive for being a node runner, and turns the internet connection pretty slowish since users compete with each other for data usage. Giving compensation with cryptocurrency you can incentivize people to run a node and make a long-term commitment, solving slow connections that Tor faces. Besides that, supplying an open-source platform that people can rely on, make profit, and contribute to an open web turns dVPNs alternative a better choice for node runners. Both Tor and dVPNs, in the end, are privacy-centered. But dVPNS brand itself as a product, and with that it offers better deals concerning support for node runners and speed for end users.
There are some projects in the run right now. Mysterium Network (MYST) and Sentinel (DVPN) let providers sell their network usage for users, who can pay with crypto. Deeper Network (DPR) has a plug-and-play device that connects to its dVPN service in any notebook or PC. HOPR (HOPR) Protocol has a meta-data privacy policy that mixes users’ data making it even more private and secure.
In short, it looks like dVPNs are more secure than actual VPNs providers if you are strongly committed to data privacy. DVPNs are censorship-resistant because of its decentralized nature, which makes them even more reliable for journalists, refugees and, activists. Clearly, dVPNs have great challenges ahead as a new solution. Because the concept of dVPN isn't mainstream yet, they have fewer node runners than what is desirable, and this ultimately compromises node runner's security. But I believe that the projects are working on that and, because they have a bigger platform, in the long run, they can improve the service encryption protocols and even provide legal advice for node runners. Still, being open-source with a strictly no-logs policy makes it much more reliable to the end-user. Using a centralized VPN service, you’ll need to trust the provider blindly; using a dVPN, you always can check or even vote with governance tokens.
What are your thoughts about it? Do you think that dVPNs will be part of the Web 3.0 ecosystem? Let your comments bellow.
This text represents the author's opinion only and should not be taken as financial advise
I write to improve my english writing skills. Any feedback is more than welcome.
